Welcome to Dear Prudence. I'm your prudence, Janae Desmond Harris. Today, we're answering

letters about who to share random thoughts with after your spouse dies, what to do when

you've saved a neighbor's life, but you don't actually want to be friends with her,

and how to handle petty insults in the family group chat. Here to help me out today is Kelsey

McKinney. She is the co-owner and a features writer at Defector.com. Her first novel, God's

for the Girls, which is so good, was published in the summer of 2021, and she's the host and

writer of the podcast, Normal Gossip, which is all about the juicy, strange, everyday gossip

from people you'll never meet. I love it. Welcome to the show, Kelsey.

Hi, thank you so much for having me, Janae. I'm so happy to be reunited here on your podcast.

It's beautiful. Yeah, and I have pulled all letters that have something to do with gossip

for you. That's great. I love mess. I know you do. You're going to have so much fun with

these. Oh, my God. Before we get started, I do want to ask you a question that we've started

asking all our guests. Do you have one piece of unsolicited advice that you would just

like to give to the world unprompted? I have infinite pieces of unsolicited advice that

I could give to the world unprompted, but the one that I think I'm giving the most frequently

recently is that you should never put your mess or your shit talking in text. You should

be using voice memos or talking on the phone because you never know when someone is going

to like screenshot your whole conversation and post it somewhere or send it to your enemy

and, you know, safety first. Or I mean, it goes without saying unslack or like

or unslack. Yeah. What you don't want is for someone to read your shit talking in a courtroom.

That's a nightmare. Right. I'm less worried about a friend like screenshotting my shit talking.

I don't know if I'm going to shit talk to someone I probably trust them. Safety. Yeah.

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