As you might imagine, the Normal Gossip inbox is a wonderful and terrible place. I’ve spent around a year and a half steeping in all that tea. (The team affectionately refers to our time spent reading long emails, poring over screenshots, and listening to batches of voicemails as “spelunking” for goss.)
This experience has had several side effects, some predictable, some less so. My bar for what is worth immediately bringing to the rest of the team has gotten higher (but it’s even more satisfying to find something truly scream-worthy). There’s a certain sameness and sadness to cheating stories and bad roommate stories, so I read those with more skepticism. I’ve learned that a story crackling with jokes and bizarre details will feel fresh no matter how predictable the actual sequence of events might be. And when a story truly haunts me—when I can’t forget a story even after a three-hour spelunking session, or a week after reading, or three months after reading—I know we’re onto something. Today’s story, a tale of a weed-studded family Thanksgiving gone awry, is one of those.
Our guest this week is Zakiya Gibbons! Zakiya is an award-winning story editor, podcast host, and writer based in Brooklyn. She's the host of the new gloriously juicy reality dating competition podcast called Hang Up, which Kelsey describes as “what if Love Is Blind and The Bachelor had a baby, and then that baby grew up to be like queer as hell.”
Zakiya told Kelsey a harrowing story about a surprising bathroom discovery in a vacation rental, and then Kelsey harrowed Zakiya right back with a tale of a new boyfriend meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time. On Thanksgiving. In a rental that sure smells like weed … and may or may not be cursed.
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(The transcript for this week’s episode can be found here.)
And if you have some good goss that you want us to hear, the email for that is normalgossip@defector.com, or phone it in to 26-79-GOSSIP.
