Olivia Nuzzi is no Joan Didion, despite her best efforts at appropriating the image and writing style of one of California’s most iconic and idiosyncratic chroniclers.
That’s the major takeaway from reviews of American Canto, the new book by Nuzzi, 32, who torpedoed her career as a star political reporter by having an alleged digital affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after she profiled him for New York magazine.
The book ostensibly provides a “firsthand account of the warping of American reality” during Donald Trump’s rise to power, written while Nuzzi was in “exile” in Malibu recovering from the fallout of her affair, which also ended her relationship with fiancé Ryan Lizza.
In fact, the book is mostly a “pretentious mess” of Didion pastiche—complete with Southern California fires, incantations, and publicity stills of Nuzzi wearing sunglasses and driving a convertible—offering no real insights, according to a handful of early reviews.
“Chapterless and scattershot, it’s an attempted letter from Trump’s America in the style of a would-be Joan Didion (on Adderall rather than Elavil),” wrote Alexandra Jacobs, a self-professed fan of Nuzzi’s earlier journalistic work, in The New York Times.
Reviewers in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post leveled similar criticisms, with the Post’s Becca Rothfeld writing that “vast swaths of it are impressively and aggressively awful,” and that unlike Didion, when Nuzzi tries to “sound literary,” her syntax is “tortured and halting.”
Perhaps more importantly, though, the book confirms some of the more damning accusations leveled by Lizza, a former Politico reporter, about the journalistic malpractice that Nuzzi committed during her relationship with Kennedy.
Nuzzi claims that her relationship with the secretary of health and human services “never turned physical,” but that they had phone sex, shared intimate photos, and said they loved each other. Kennedy, who has been married to actress Cheryl Hines since 2014, says they never had an affair.
She was fired from New York magazine after the relationship was revealed, and was announced this fall as a West Coast editor for Vanity Fair.
According to Lizza, Nuzzi used her assignments for New York to gather political intel for Kennedy—who was running for president at the time—and later to help negotiate his endorsement of Trump, which earned him a Cabinet position.
She also allegedly helped him “catch and kill” damning stories, including a story about Kennedy dumping a baby bear carcass in Central Park, by getting exclusives from sources and then declining to publish them, Lizza wrote in a series of Substack posts.
Those political maneuverings involved lying to sources, gaining their trust, and then revealing them to Kennedy, in a stunning breach of journalistic ethics, Lizza alleges.
In American Canto, Nuzzi describes alerting Kennedy to the bear cub carcass story and telling him to get ahead of it, and admits to secretly acting as Kennedy’s adviser, according to The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg.
“It was not my place or interest to tell him what to do, but to be helpful and supportive while he weighed his options,” she writes.
Incredibly, Nuzzi doesn’t seem to recognize that she had committed appalling journalistic malfeasance, according to Goldberg.
Instead, she blames Lizza for making her private life public and accuses New York magazine of being “spooked into participating in what I considered a siege of hyper-domestic terror.”
According to the Post’s Rothfeld, Nuzzi refuses to explore or expose what on earth attracted her to Kennedy, instead writing baffling sentences such as: “Like all men but more so, he was a hunter. In a literal sense, he used not a bullet but a bird.”
She also appears strangely blind to the fact that Kennedy—a long-time anti-vaccine crusader and one of the nation’s foremost peddlers of debunked conspiracy theories—is himself responsible for the “warping of American reality” that the book claims to dissect, Goldberg notes.
The book casually drops information that would have been nice to know before Kennedy became the nation’s health chief, like the fact that he’s is “not good in a crisis,” “did not handle stress well,” yells and loses his temper, and was doing psychedelic drugs despite being a “sober” recovering heroin addict.
Buried in the book is also the news that Kennedy has already started thinking about running for president as a Republican in 2028.
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