One of the many delights of America is that its geography is also a vocabulary. If I say “Portland, Oregon,” or “the Hamptons,” or “Appalachia,” the reader knows instantly which stereotypes are being invoked: the middle-class Maoist, the summering WASP, the hick. This shorthand allows American authors to invest their prose with extra meaning, just by using it somewhere.
The rollout for Olivia Nuzzi’s new book, American Canto, has therefore leaned heavily into the elementary turbulence of California. Nuzzi immolated her career as a political writer at New York magazine by becoming romantically entangled with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after she wrote a profile of him in 2023. Kennedy—a former heroin addict turned vaccine skeptic whom Donald Trump later installed as head of the Department of Health and Human Services—was then running for president.
When Nuzzi fled west after the affair became public, the Palisades started burning, too. “The sun boils red into the water,” she writes in American Canto, adding: “Below us, fire, above us, fire.” To promote the book, she gave an interview to The New York Times, which was accompanied by moody black-and-white photos in which Nuzzi posed on the shore of the Pacific Ocean and took the writer to her favorite rock—located, the reporter explained, “at the edge of a vertiginous cliff, where water rolled and crashed.”
[Read: Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. so convinced he’s right?]
American Canto is Nuzzi’s attempt to elevate a grubby affair to the status of the mythic, to transmute the base metal of Page Six sexting stories into the gold of literary reflections on the political moment. “A very, very good outcome would be if the book was received with open minds in 20 or 30 years,” she told a differentTimes reporter a few days ago. What better setting, then, than the land that the journalist Joan Didion chronicled so scrupulously? In the American imagination, Florida is where you go when you’ve done something wrong. California is where you go when you’ve done something wrong and want to be pretentious about it.
I understand this impulse. As I write this, I’m visiting the Golden State. Yesterday, the air in the mountains smelled of pine, whereas November in London smells like pigeons and rain. The ocean here really is as blue and fathomless as Kennedy’s eyes, and the bougainvillea as red as his face that time he did pull-ups on camera with Pete Hegseth. This morning, I went whale watching, and the guide recommended that we “keep our eyes on the horizon and look for blow.” (This is also a good way to find RFK Jr.)
But all the surf and smoke and Didionesque stylings in the world cannot disguise the central problem with American Canto: It is not honest. In the book, Nuzzi rails against those who urge her to tell all. “I do not wish to be understood,” she writes, “which no one seems to understand.” This is a very good reason not to write and publish a memoir.
What happened to Nuzzi has drawn more prurient interest than any American political sex scandal since Monica Lewinsky. In that case, the woman who had sexual encounters with Bill Clinton as a 22-year-old intern, and was covertly recorded and betrayed by one of her confidantes, has since reclaimed her own voice, disowned her shame, and become a Vanity Fair contributor.
Nuzzi is using parts of this playbook—right down to the involvement of Vanity Fair, which hired her as its West Coast editor—but the power dynamics involved in her story are a little different. She is not an ingénue but a seasoned reporter who has courted publicity for half her lifetime. As a teenager, she released a pop single under the title “Jailbait”—sample lyric “16, will get you 20.” She then reportedly dated the former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who, according to the journalist Ryan Lizza, paid for her college and her studio apartment. (“I made an f-ton then,” Olbermann wrote in response. Nuzzi told the Times she had nothing to say about “this person.”) She worked for Anthony Weiner’s campaign for New York City mayor, sold a story to the New York Daily News on how shambolic it was, and became a correspondent for The Daily Beast at just 22. Two years later, she joined New York magazine as a Washington correspondent—a job that involved crisscrossing the country, getting close to Donald Trump and his advisers, and once walking into his campaign manager’s home without permission. By 2022, she was engaged to Lizza, who was nearly two decades her senior and had been fired from The New Yorker during the #MeToo era for unspecified offenses.
Nuzzi rose through journalism quickly, which often attracts enemies. In recent years, she has become one of those writers whom readers expect to encounter as a persona within the story. “The more visible I was at any given time, the more that became an intrusion,” she writes in American Canto, “because you cannot be a fly on the wall when people would like a picture with the fly, and when the sweet older woman has a grandson in medical school who Just has the biggest crush on the fly and Actually, if the fly does not mind, she is Going to call Michael right now, this will just make his day.”
That persona was on display in her 2023 interview with Kennedy, which described traveling in his filthy car and fending off his uncontrolled dogs. Afterward, Nuzzi appears to have become obsessed with him, something to which she never quite admits in American Canto, instead framing the relationship as a reciprocated love affair with a figure referred to as “the Politician.” She has claimed that the affair was digital-only; Kennedy denies it happened at all. I see no reason to believe either of them. Kennedy is a conspiracist and a narcissist, and Nuzzi is, by her own admission, an unreliable narrator. In the book, she describes initially lying to her boss when confronted, and to a reporter who called for comment.
I also don’t care much about the precise details of the relationship. Journalists obviously shouldn’t sleep with their sources, although luckily most of us are so hideous, the subject simply doesn’t arise. (Once, an actor made a half-hearted pass at me at the end of an interview, but apart from anything else, it was 3 p.m. on a weekday afternoon, and I’m not an animal.)
The more serious allegation, made in Lizza’s Substack, is that Nuzzi wrote campaign memos for Kennedy and helped him to “catch and kill” unflattering stories. (Nuzzi didn’t reply to my interview request.) If so, then she colluded in raising Kennedy—a crank intent on acting as the enabler in chief of preventable childhood diseases—to the position of health secretary, which is far more reprehensible than an unwise attack of forbidden ardor. One of the news stories buried in this book is that Kennedy has already started to think about running for president as a Republican in 2028. God help us all.
Only by real force of will can a reader separate American Canto, the actual text Nuzzi has written, from the penumbra of gossip and schadenfreude surrounding her—or from the glamorous image she has alternately fought against and cultivated. Her photo takes up the entire back cover of my copy of American Canto, and the excerpt in Vanity Fair included yet more glamorous portraits of her by the Pacific Ocean. The magazine’s print issue features an “abstract nude portrait” of her by the artist Isabelle Brourman, who once accompanied Nuzzi to Mar-a-Lago. In the book, Nuzzi writes that bringing along Brourman while she interviewed Trump appealed to his vanity.
The excerpt’s publication ratcheted up the Nuzzi hate, because it contained several of the book’s worst sentences. “We had been born under the same kind of moon, the January waxing gibbous in Capricorn, 97 percent illumination, 39 years apart,” she says of Kennedy, adding a whiff of Deepak Chopra. Explaining the politician’s need for bodyguards, Nuzzi veers toward bathos: “I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain.”
That same day, Lizza published the first installment of his side of the story. In a Substack post, he alleged that Nuzzi had previously cheated on him with another failed presidential candidate, Mark Sanford. This prompted everyone over 30 in journalism to reminisce fondly about what a great euphemism “hiking the Appalachian trail” was—and everyone under 30 to say, “Who?” (Through a lawyer, Nuzzi told theTimes that the book covered the only instance in her career of an inappropriate relationship with a source.)
Nuzzi’s ex-boyfriend held back the Sanford reveal until the last line of his post. This schlocky but effective literary device instantly put me on Team Lizza, as did the fact that his organizing metaphor for the scandal, the invasive bamboo in their garden—“like bamboo, the truth has a way of forcing itself out into the open”—was less awkward than hers, a fire that killed more than a dozen people.
But I have since defected to pure neutrality. Lizza has disputed that he also cheated on Nuzzi, as she claims in the book, reportedly writing to her publisher: “I have recordings of the conversations between me and Olivia during the relevant period in 2024… and this purported scene doesn’t exist on any recording.” So: Your assertion that your girlfriend was the toxic party in your relationship is backed up by the fact that you recorded every argument with her? Of course. This was the most self-incriminating defense since Olbermann got back in touch with theTimes to clarify that he began sleeping with Nuzzi when she was 19, rather than 18. As if anyone who frowned on the latter would be mollified by the former.
Then again, the only real battle in public life today is grabbing the microphone and hanging on to it as long as possible. Most of those involved in Nuzzi’s story have undertaken that most modern of pastimes: posting through it. She wrote a book; Lizza wrote multiple blog posts, putting the dirtiest laundry behind a paywall; Olbermann wrote a tweet likening himself to Keanu Reeves dodging a bullet in The Matrix. This feels like power, but it isn’t. You can tell because the only person in this story with real power is RFK Jr., and he is—I cannot believe I am typing this sentence—maintaining a dignified silence. After a decade of Trumpism, no one is bothering to even half-heartedly suggest that he should resign his high government post. He doesn’t need to “reclaim the narrative” because he’s too busy helping kids catch measles.
American Canto is a better book than the rollout suggested. Yes, the narrative is a mishmash. Here is Britney Spears, dancing saucer-eyed for an online audience. Here are allegedly verbatim conversations with sources, and extended interviews with Trump. Here are undigested lumps of fact and awkward explanations that would not survive to a second draft: “The place reminded me of the Playboy Mansion as I had seen it depicted on a reality television show about Hugh Hefner and his three central girlfriends.” (Oh, that Playboy mansion.) And here are tortured circlings around the Kennedy business, a series of almost-confessions that play footsie with the reader.
These parts of the narrative are largely terrible. Someone else’s sexual obsession is, by default, illegible and perhaps even horrifying to outsiders. (You watched him floss?) Sentences such as “As the coyote, my heart makes itself heard. As the coyote, it cries” are not real expressions of human emotion, nor are they representative of Nuzzi’s clear, elegant prose style elsewhere. The language seems tortured by Nuzzi’s efforts to rewrite her life-upending crush into a mutual whirlwind of passion, to turn herself from Ophelia into Juliet.
The sheer desperation of her love for Kennedy is interesting, because we don’t associate this level of libidinous self-destruction with women. Nuzzi herself doesn’t look it in the face—as the novelists Elizabeth Gilbert and Miranda July have recently done—but the intensity of her emotion creeps out, as in a reference she makes to Adam selling out Eve. Nuzzi apparently delighted in telling Kennedy that she, too, was Catholic, which reads less as a declaration of faith and more like pretending to your high-school boyfriend that you also dig the Ramones.
At its best, American Canto is about a crack-up. Being a political reporter today involves spending so much time around liars—Kennedy, Trump, various MAGA chuds—that any of us might end up severed from reality. When Nuzzi asks Kennedy about the bizarre story of him picking up a dead bear cub from the side of a road in upstate New York and leaving it in Central Park, he goes quiet. “He was seldom silent, and by then I knew that when he was silent, it was because he had not yet told himself the story he would tell others.” When the scandal of their relationship breaks, she recounts, he expects her to take the fall.
According to Nuzzi, covering the White House reminded her of growing up with her alcoholic, mentally ill mother. “I developed this ability to exist on dual planes, and an ability to mitigate conflict,” she writes, in a way “that really served me in covering Trump’s rise to power, and all the people around him angling for power and proximity to power.”
Near the end of the book, Nuzzi observes that the reality-television president has “succeeded in making all political and media actors into actors.” Even those who oppose him still revolve around him, which is a form of “collusion,” Nuzzi believes. Kennedy tells her that Trump is “a novel: hundreds of lies that amount to one big truth,” a line that makes her “almost jealous.”
[Read: RFK Jr.’s cheer squad is getting restless]
These parts of the book gesture at “Insider Baseball,” Didion’s classic exposé of the 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis’s campaign. That essay offers a caustic depiction of American politics and the soul-destroying work of reporting on it—and also reveals Didion’s steel core: She is brutal about Dukakis, with his lamely staged ball-tossing and Greek dancing, and completely dismembers the rest of the campaign press pack for its participation in this fraud. She writes like someone with no desire to be invited back in four years to do it all again.
Nuzzi, by contrast, appears to be stuck in an abusive relationship with Washington, D.C., even though she knows it could kill her. (Maybe that is why she started the relationship with Kennedy, to have the choice taken away from her?) She appears to love the sucking up and the selling out, the secrecy and the danger. To maintain an aura of insiderishness, she lightly and pointlessly disguises the identities of other political figures—the “MAGA General,” for example, is Steve Bannon—even though there has never been a less covert group of leakers in the world. (Deep Throat did not have a podcast.) To borrow her own metaphor, American Canto does not read like its author is burning her path back to Washington.
There is no real, believable regret in American Canto, not even when Nuzzi acknowledges that Kennedy used her badly and discarded her. Memoirs of temporary madness are usually written from the safe shore of sanity. But based on what’s in the book, I suspect that if RFK Jr. turned up at Nuzzi’s door tomorrow with a single rose and a hopeful smile, she would fall for it, and him, all over again.
American Canto was written too early, and too quickly. It is a first draft, hastily typed into a smartphone; a bargaining chip to gain favorable news coverage; a down payment on a post-scandal career. A tell-all memoir? Ha. This is a tell-nothing memoir. Instead, it is a portrait of losing your soul—of discovering, as Nuzzi quotes from Nietzsche, that when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
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