Olivia Nuzzi loved him. She loved the politician, even though she was a political reporter and he was then a presidential candidate she had written about. She loved his eyes, “blue as the flame.” She loved that “the sight of something as trivial as a rose” could move him to tears. She loved his insatiable appetites and his “particular complications and particular darkness.”
But she said “I love you” only after he said it first. He called her “Livvy” and wrote her poems. He said he wanted her to have his baby. He promised to take a bullet for her.
This is what Nuzzi writes in her memoir, “American Canto,” never naming the politician who readers will deduce is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
At the height of the 2024 presidential campaign, Nuzzi seemed to have a digital affair with Kennedy centered around texts and phone calls. The revelation derailed her career, led to her firing at New York magazine, and precipitated a very public explosion of her relationship with another prominent political journalist. Kennedy tried to brush her off, saying he had met her just once for the “hit piece” she wrote and threw his support behind Donald J. Trump, eventually becoming a cabinet secretary in his administration.
Nuzzi disappeared for a year, in self-imposed exile in Los Angeles where she wrote “American Canto” in secret. The book, which comes out Dec. 2 and is described here for the first time, paints a picture of a nation and a personal life on fire. She describes the mutual infatuation that consumed her, even if it was never consummated. (She is ambiguous in the book, but said in one of many interviews, “We were not sleeping together.”) But “American Canto” is far more about bearing witness to Trumpworld and about how she believes that warped her, just as it warped the country.
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