Olivia Nuzzi Is Completely Oblivious

Olivia Nuzzi attends Pivot MIA at 1 Hotel South Beach on Feb. 16, 2022, in Miami.  Photo: Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images for Vox Media

Olivia Nuzzi’s world is populated by beasts, and by monsters.

“American Canto” opens with cockroaches, and a call from The Politician. “The Politician” is the tiring epithet Nuzzi uses throughout her memoir to reference Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man with whom the whole world now knows she had some degree of affair. It ends with a red-tailed hawk and a drone, a juxtaposition that underscores the degree to which the journalist’s life is now mediated by public interest in what was once private. In the 300-page course of “Canto,” birds of all feathers appear: the ravens Kennedy takes an interest in befriending (or subjugating), turkeys, swallows, cardinals, owls. President Donald Trump, the “character” Nuzzi has spent one-third of her time on Earth serving as “witness” to as a vocation, is “sophisticated” but still an “animal.” (He is also, I’m sorry to say, described in the phrase “a Gemini nation under a Gemini ruler.”)

What feels undebatable, in what’s likely been a mad-dash Washington parlor game of decoding all the unnamed characters, is that Kennedy is one of the book’s monsters. He is also, variously, a bull and a lion. We learn Kennedy in his human form is often shirtless. He was the “hunter” (“Like all men but more so,” we read, mouths agape), and she was the prey. We know this because of an extended metaphor that begins with considering a baby bird pushed from a nest — Nuzzi recounts, briefly, her difficult relationship with an alcoholic and mentally ill mother — then “swallowed up by some kind of monster” where “in her first and final act, she had made the monster stronger.” Nuzzi means to tell us that she was the woman consumed, first by love, and then by a nation of gawkers who still can’t look away.

“I’m annoyed that I had to learn about any of this crap,” comedian Adam Friedland tells Nuzzi in an interview for his eponymous show released to his subscribers on Tuesday night. Friedland, who often serves as a conduit for his audience’s own reactions, does seem actually annoyed, as I often felt while reading this book.

“I’m sorry,” Nuzzi replies, looking genuinely apologetic and mildly uncomfortable.

There’s real insight to be gleaned about how the former New York magazine journalist allowed herself to be used by a political project working to turn back the clock on scientific progress by decades and result in more dead children, but that’s not why Nuzzi is apologizing, or even writing this book. The greatest failing of “American Canto” is its inability to look too far outside itself. The revelations we’re meant to believe that Nuzzi has been to hell and back to earn are gossamer-thin and so lightly worn, they float in on the Santa Ana winds and just as abruptly vanish, uninterrogated. She often punctuates sentences, offset by commas, with the phrases “I think” or “I suppose,” lest we get the idea that she’s holding onto anything too tightly.

Crucially, all this thinking about our messed-up country is only of interest because it has forcefully and publicly intersected with the author’s personal life. In this way, it is perhaps the purest version of a Washington memoir yet, one that pretends to be about America and about politics and our twisted state of play but is really an exercise in the writer gesturing at these things with no appreciation for the real stakes of every policy decision made by this administration for real people. It’s all just a “kaleidoscopic” — Nuzzi’s repeated word choice — backdrop for the media to use in a clever lede before getting back to who’s up and who’s down and who’s interesting.

To emphasize this weightlessness, the author goes to great pains to remind us that, for all its flaws, such as electing an authoritarian with fascist ambitions not once but twice, she loves this country. (In the author’s note that opens the book, Nuzzi proclaims the book is “about love … and about love of country.”) There is plentiful red, white, and blue. Mentions of the flag are so numerous that I had to switch pens while underlining them. There are bullets and guns, including the loaded one that Nuzzi comes to keep on her nightstand. There is much discussion of God (Nuzzi, like Kennedy, was raised Catholic). Just a couple pages in, there is JonBenét Ramsey — another beautiful blonde, Nuzzi seems to be saying, who became, against her will, an avatar for a greater spiritual rot at the core of American culture.

Like at least a few great writers before her, Nuzzi fled the East Coast for Los Angeles (specifically Malibu, where she is surrounded by both literal and metaphorical fires) after news of the affair broke. Once there, she compares herself to the Black Dahlia, drained of blood for an eager nation to see as she’s bafflingly, symbolically hoisted above the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

There is mercifully little Ryan Lizza, the journalist Nuzzi refers to as “the man I did not marry,” who has proven she dodged a bullet by recounting his side of the story on his Substack (where, cleverly if cravenly, the first installment was free to draw readers in and subsequent numbered chapters have been paywalled). In the Friedland interview, Nuzzi denies Lizza’s allegations that she covered up information about the Trump assassination attempt and that she caught and killed stories damaging to Kennedy. When the host presses her about why she won’t sue her ex for defamation, Nuzzi points out that he rarely appears in the book, saying, “Like, I forgot him,” which is actually a pretty good burn. Lizza, who was fired from The New Yorker for “improper sexual conduct” (which he denies), has been let off in this saga far too easily; for all his yammering now, he did precious little to intervene when it actually might have mattered — say, during Kennedy’s confirmation hearing.

When Nuzzi dares to engage with substantive politics, it’s in careful, distant terms. By my count, there was one mention of Gaza, in a headline — “Mayhem in Gaza” — which she recounts only to give us a sense of time and of place. (It’s worth noting that in the selected headline, “mayhem” reduces the genocide in Gaza to something like a natural disaster.) She witnesses a pickup truck (Real America!) covered in Make America Great Again stickers; she sees protesters holding signs that read “STOP ARMING ISRAEL.” Nuzzi flattens it all. “The discourse, right and left, is filled with people remarking,” she writes, affecting a detached tone that sounds like a discount Joan Didion. In another section, Nuzzi pictures herself being (metaphorically) hit in a drone strike, which feels, to put it mildly, a bit lacking in self-awareness in the year 2025.

It’s all sound and fury, and to the chronicler of it all, it signifies absolutely nothing.

Tellingly, one of Nuzzi’s monsters doesn’t come off all that badly. She quotes her own phone and in-person conversations with Trump at great length (one unbroken monologue lasts an entire page). After all, the now-two-time president was her beat, and with their fates intertwined, she has reaped the professional rewards. She calls him “tyrannical” with “authoritarian fantasies,” and concedes that she was “sometimes fooled” by the “skilled practitioners” of MAGA. But Trump comes off in “American Canto” as slightly, if not dramatically, more interior than we’ve come to expect. I was darkly surprised by the billionaire musing that “illegal immigrants saved my life,” because without them, he wouldn’t have been able to ride their suffering all the way to the White House.

Trump, like Nuzzi, was for a time kicked out of his position of power, and in those four years of Joe Biden was put through a criminal trial in New York. (There has been no indication that he spent his time in exile reading Dante or the King James Bible, as Nuzzi apparently did.) Outside the courthouse, early in the book, Nuzzi watches a man self-immolate and spends the rest of the day with the taste of his burning flesh in her mouth. She doesn’t name him until nearly 200 pages in, instead opting for terms like “the boy who missed his mother and could no longer bear to be here.” Nuzzi bemoans that the TV cameras, once they learn the self-immolation is unrelated to the president or his policies, turn away from the scene. The observation turns her into yet another bystander in her own story, rather than a powerful journalist who made coverage decisions and chose the words she used to describe our world every day. She could have helped shape a different history by reporting with moral conviction about the events happening before her eyes, but instead, she looked around for someone, anyone, and was left wanting.