“Katie Lister, you are such a gossip. Don’t you know that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all?” I am six years old, and a burly dinner lady is berating me for telling everyone that Lauren Moorecroft flashed her knickers to everyone on the monkey bars before class. That was one of many key moments in my childhood where I internalised the message that I talk too much and that was a bad thing. I was a “chatterbox”, a “motormouth”, and worst of all, a “gossip”.

Not that any of those names stopped me from endlessly prying into other people’s business and then talking about it. I grew up to be a historian and newspaper columnist , which is just a fancy type of gossiping . But from the day that the dinner lady told me off to now, I have struggled to unde

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