Don’t Spill a Drop

On American Canto by Olivia Nuzzi

If you have ever had a reporter try to seduce you then this isn’t such a salacious story. There is no sin quite as unforgivable as mistaking a mark for a lover. No one exits the carnage with a happy ending. Like her former lover, Robert F. Kennedy Junior, Olivia Nuzzi is prone to temper tantrums. Her breakdowns, however, occur while decked out in Gucci. She would like to be seen as Joan Didion reincarnate, a reporter reflecting on the “scorched earth” of her life while hiding out in Malibu. But her new memoir is more concerned with building this mythology than rehashing old gossip and erotic passion. Nuzzi wants to write a glamorous account of becoming a fallen woman, but she comes up short on insight.

It’s unlikely you’ve managed to maintain an online presence and not hear about the colossal fallout of Nuzzi’s affair with Kennedy. She covered the anti-vaxxer’s presidential campaign before apparently falling in love with the controversial figure. It’s unclear if their relationship was ever physical. They both insist it was merely a flirtation. Before the affair Nuzzi was known for her stylish political reporting on Trump and his associates at New York Magazine. Few achieved such a high-power position, she was the first Washington correspondent for the publication. In the media landscape, she’s an anomaly, continually landing on her feet despite repeated layoffs.

After the collapse of her private and professional life, Nuzzi camped out in Malibu. (Lizza too has been writing dispatches about the whole sordid mess from Death Valley.) While hiding from the paparazzi, she began writing her memoir and was hired at Vanity Fair despite her tarnished reputation. (The magazine has since parted ways with Nuzzi.) In the lead up to American Canto, Jacob Bernstein, son of Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron, wrote a fawning profile of Nuzzi for The New York Times. Bernstein makes a big fuss over the “Hitchcock blonde” who listens to Nancy Sinatra and writes while hiking.

In Nuzzi’s telling, this is a story not of ethics but vengeance. Her ex, disgraced journalist Ryan Lizza, leaked details of her affair with Kennedy out of spite after the two reporters called off their engagement. Nuzzi claims Lizza was controlling—and in fact she’d jumped to him after escaping a previous controlling lover, sports journalist Keith Olbermann. Kennedy, in turn, told Nuzzi: “I need you take a bullet for me.” She took the fall for their affair and was subsequently fired from her job at New York Magazine for cozying up with a source and not disclosing her clearly conflict of interest. Kennedy was running for president at the time the two had an affair and Nuzzi was covering the race. American Canto does not reveal all the juicy details. Nuzzi simply refers to Lizza as “the man I did not marry.” It’s unclear what these pseudo-literary monikers accomplish, but all of these men fail her in their own dubious, underhanded ways.

The journalism world has treated the affair like a circus. Lizza’s Substack campaign to besmirch Nuzzi has given us a few bombshells and a few duds. For Lizza, this “is not really a scandal about sex, but a scandal about journalistic ethics.” He claims it’s not the first time Nuzzi has been intimate with a source, claiming she also had an affair with Mark Sanford in 2020. Lizza also claims Nuzzi helped kill stories that would’ve hurt Kennedy during his failed presidential campaign—something Nuzzi seems to lightly admit to in her memoir—and that she may have heard a rumor about the attempted assasination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania before the shooting occurred. It’s unclear how reliable his claims are, considering his obvious vendetta. Others have resurfaced Nuzzi’s former social media footprint to damn her. She once tweeted: “Why does Hollywood think female reporters sleep with their sources?” She also released a song called “Jailbait” when she was a teenager. The New York Post is reliably eating the scandal up.

Many were hungry for Nuzzi’s side of the story, hoping to read a libidinous tale of high-stakes deceit. But American Canto never stumbles on a thesis. It’s a short, rambling collection of notes and ephemera, reporting and personal anecdotes. She covers her engagement to Lizza, her childhood, her work at New York, before briefly covering her affair and the immediate aftermath. The book begins and ends, however, with her exile in Malibu. Frankly, it’s a mess of notes with no clear timeline more than a cohesive narrative. She often goes on diatribes about school shootings, the drones buzzing over her reclusive hideout, and the plight of being a scorned woman.

While Nuzzi claims that this is not “a book about the president or even about politics,” it is certainly enamored by Trumpworld. Every personal loss and triumph from losing her parents to calling off her engagement are sandwiched between conversations with our current president. He gets far more screen time than Kennedy. She enjoys being the one “liberal” he enjoys talking to, supine and amiable, challenging him only when she believes he’s lying. There is a long section comparing Trump’s ear to the fragile state of democracy after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. While she claims to detest his lies, she is a patriot at heart, enjoying the theatrical nature of Trump as much as the next political junkie. “It is also a book about love, because everything is about love, and about love of country,” she writes in the introduction as if she were a Substack princess instead of a woman writing about the decline of an empire. She claims to Cassandra, but what, exactly, is she warning us of?

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The opening of American Canto is not entirely dissimilar to Nuzzi’s previous political reporting for New York Magazine. A metaphor gets away from her, thrashes around, and runs out of steam. Rinse and repeat. This stuttering occurs for a good fifty pages before we get to the actual story of “The Politician,” Nuzzi’s codename for Kennedy. Few editors let their children get away with such high and mighty meandering introductions, full of grand pronouncements and sweeping generalizations. Nuzzi was one of the few political reporters who had style. But clearly Nuzzi was on a tight leash at New York. In her memoir, she’s crafted a new elaborate persona for herself as a wronged woman in the vein of Brittany Spears and Pamela Anderson. The litany of women she compares herself to doesn’t end: “JonBenét Ramsey said that if you are beautiful you may get killed in service to your country.” In a recent interview with Emily Sundberg, Nuzzi claimed that Monica Lewinsky reached out to her after the deluge of negative press her new book has received. Whether or not you buy into Nuzzi’s victimization, she’d prefer you see her as “the victim of a crime… not… a victim.”

There is little admission of fault or complicity on Nuzzi’s end, though she does admit she lied about the affair to her boss and the press. She does not, however, acknowledge the abysmal and deadly healthcare policies of her former lover. Nor does she parse through his misinformed conspiratorial anti-vaccine policies as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. She waves it off as the work of politics—everyone needs a crusade. Kennedy’s current wife, actress Cheryl Hines, is hardly mentioned. In Nuzzi’s original profile of “The Politician,” Hines is only mentioned in passing. “Poor Cheryl,” she writes. American Canto skates over the political stratosphere, giving color without much critique. While she claims to be critical of Trump, Nuzzi certainly seems to enjoy his company.

If you are reading this, you’re probably wondering if Nuzzi’s memoir is worth reading. It is, with the caveat it’s not a very good book. It’s full of forced mic-drop moments that land with a heavy-handed thud. The opening of the book repeats “I mean to tell you” and “Which is to say” a mind-numbing amount of times. It’s full of fragments, some interesting, some banal: transcripts of interviews, FBI reports, long conversations with Trump, and clunky nicknames for key characters like the “War Hero” (probably John McCain) and the “South African tech billionaire” (Elon Musk). She intersperses her work with quotes by Alfred Hitchcock, Nietzsche, Langston Hughes, and Jane Birkin. Nuzzi’s attempts at mimicking Didion’s cadence are undercut by her repetitive prose. These are not the viciously calculated columns Didion wrote for New York Review of Books. This is a cry for help. It’s not that Nuzzi isn’t a good writer, it’s that her political analysis and character studies are lost in a sea of indecipherable sentences. Her New York magazine columns were far better—there she had a target. The problem is that in interrogating her own life she misses the mark. Herself.

Nuzzi’s original profile of Kennedy is far more perceptive than her book. The details of their affair are mostly glossed over in American Canto. He wants to get her pregnant, he enjoys waxing poetic about DMT, and he writes her love poetry. She, meanwhile, loves him wholesale—whether or not he has a worm in his brain. (“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. I hated the idea of an intruder therein.”) She listens to his stories on phone calls and during their meetings and wryly notes that “betrayal seemed to manifest through the politics of boats.” She likes that they both find corvids to be striking birds. After the break-up, they agree on a spin. It was only a flirtation. Only Nuzzi’s brother is strong enough to try and ask why she’s dating Kennedy. “It’s not daddy issues, right?”

How could someone trash her credibility so thoroughly for a man so unattractive? Nuzzi lays it out within the first few pages: “I mean to tell you that as I studied them, I was sometimes fooled. Fooled about their power. Fooled about my own. Fooled about the nature of power.” By linking herself to Kennedy, Nuzzi ascends to the national stage, no longer just a reporter. It’s unclear who started the covert digital adultery, Nuzzi or Kennedy, but their alleged activities border on the vanilla side. The one exception is that Nuzzi’s ex-fiancee Ryan Lizza bemoaned having to know what felching is because of Kennedy’s erotic love poems: “‘Don’t spill a drop’. I am a river You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.”

Certainly, she doesn’t see how her relationship with Kennedy would be a conflict of interest. Instead she seems to think the libs are out to get her because of her negative coverage of Biden during his mental decline during the 2024 election. Her own politics are never clearly defined. She neither regrets nor admonishes, merely observes. Across short histories of California and drone technology, she reaches for profundity and comes up lacking because she has no point of view. These fragmentary political commentaries offer no thesis, only a distraction from her inner suffering. Nuzzi would prefer us to look elsewhere than at the vulnerability of her pain.

Somewhere in American Canto is a great breakup book. But instead of real vulnerability, Nuzzi delivers pithy comments and meme-ladden snark. “Girl Dinner,” a cashier tells her when she buys a can of Diet Coke. Capris, she tells us, do not count as smoking. Empty calories. Unfortunately many of her sentences are similarly barren. The cliches fall apart like soggy bread. “You cannot outrun your life on fire,” “There are two types of men who are the most dangerous,” “Males intrude by nature,” “I would die before I hurt you.” She talks about the “loaded gun” of her affair as an opening to discuss the history of mass shootings. The strands of political violence—from Parkland to the attack on Paul Pelosi to the self-immolation of Maxwell Azzarrello—never quite cohere. They do not occur in the same mundane world of sleeping with a politician. This self-aggrandizing mythology is less interesting than her more flinty prose, which only comes in brief flashes. Occasionally, when she writes from an observational perspective instead of a memorist’s, she finds gems. An actress tells her that “the secret to life is to be rapeable.”

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Nuzzi, like Didon, can blend in. She enjoys disappearing into the anonymous role of the reporter—a little ego death for the woman who has it all. By trying to insert herself back into the narrative, as Nuzzi does in American Canto, she loses her primary skill as a writer: her ability to isolate the quirks of her characters. Instead, her neuroses are on full display. We can read her crafting her story in real time. It’s just not the one we’d like. There is a world where Nuzzi delivered a good book while stifling our expectations, but that is not the one we live in. Instead, we must settle for a book that attempts many things and fails at them all. There is no gossip, no political acumen, and no heartbreak. Nuzzi never seems sure what kind of mythology she’d most like to build. Is she a victim or a mastermind?

Towards the beginning of American Canto, Nuzzi quotes Hitchcock: “Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.” It is yet another self-styling sleight of hand, the director and the victim one and the same. Nuzzi clearly has a set of aesthetic references she would like to be read alongside. But elegance, like taste, is not bought. It is earned.

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Review of Paper Girl for New Yorker.

On question marks for Granta.

Review of the new Florence album for New Yorker.

A misguided biography of Luigi Mangione for New Statesman.

I was interviewed by my one of my favorite podcasts Ordinary Unhappiness as well as Lux Magazine, both about Herculine. Herculine has been featured on some year end lists as well—-including LitHub, Dazed, LibraryJournal, MUBI, Them, and Debutiful.