The Scandalous Rollout Was the Best Part of Olivia Nuzzi’s Memoir

By now, it is a truism that Donald Trump is a showman: a President who lauds appointees with talk of “central casting,” and workshops his riffs onstage while gauging the crowd’s reaction. “He succeeded in making all political and media actors into actors,” Olivia Nuzzi writes, near the end of her much anticipated new memoir, “American Canto.” Nuzzi evidently includes herself among these figures, which strikes a note of surprising passivity. If she’s an actor, it’s because she made herself into one.

Nuzzi is a political journalist whose clear ambition and ability, in the course of roughly a decade, powered her swift professional ascent. In 2017, at the age of twenty-four, she was named the Washington correspondent at New York magazine; there, she published a series of stories that helped to define the first Trump Administration as a circus of comic dysfunction, dominated by the infighting of outsized personalities and prone to gossipy disclosures toward which she maintained a pose of knowing amusement. (I was also employed at New York during this period, but our work did not intersect.) In 2024, she was covering the campaign trail (a headline: “I Examined Donald Trump’s Ear—and His Soul—at Mar-a-Lago”) when news broke that she’d had a “personal relationship” with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. She had written about Kennedy’s Presidential campaign the previous year, and later produced an influential piece that aired insiders’ misgivings about President Joe Biden’s fitness to remain in office. The news of her entanglement cast doubt on the objectivity of such reporting. It also set in motion a tabloid frenzy that “American Canto” has revived.

Since the first reports about Kennedy and Nuzzi appeared, she’s parted ways with both her employer and her fiancé, relocated to California, and gotten a new job as the West Coast editor of Vanity Fair. That magazine published an excerpt of “American Canto” last month, part of a publicity rollout that did not seem to go entirely according to plan. Ryan Lizza, the ex-fiancé and a fellow political journalist, has greeted the book on his Substack with an ongoing barrage of allegations. He claims, among other things, that Nuzzi has had sex with the former governor Mark Sanford, another of her onetime profile subjects, and acted as a Kennedy campaign operative in her capacity as a journalist. Vanity Fair has now placed Nuzzi’s employment under review. (A lawyer for Nuzzi characterized Lizza’s political-operative allegations as “harassment” and stated that the disclosures in “American Canto” marked the “only instance in her long career as a journalist in which she had an improper relationship with someone she was covering.” The necessary disclaimers in this saga have a way of piling up: Lizza previously wrote for The New Yorker; Vanity Fair, like The New Yorker, is owned by Condé Nast.) The result was a niche-celebrity soap opera, generating an explosion of publicity and social-media commentary and mesmerizing a public whose interest, whether prurient or high-minded, appeared inexhaustible.

Amid the tumult of gossip, “American Canto” arrives as a peculiar artifact. It refuses chronology and coherence, which makes it a challenge to extract answers to any of the many questions a reader loosely aware of her story might have. According to Nuzzi, when leadership at New York learned of her involvement with Kennedy in 2024, she was presented with a choice. “It was determined that there was only one way for me to survive such a public relations crisis,” she writes. “Tell all. Spare no detail, spare my job and my life as it was. That was the offer on the table.” Her response—“I did not consider this”—might seem disingenuous in a memoir built around the events at issue, but it turns out to be true enough. “American Canto” does not tell all. Readers looking for a clearer understanding of her involvement with Kennedy will be disappointed. Last year, as the scandal was breaking, Nuzzi insisted that the relationship had never been physically consummated. In Lizza’s recent missives, he writes that he questions her account and shares an explicit poem purportedly written by Kennedy; in the book, the facts remain murky. Nuzzi has Kennedy telling her that “if it’s just sex, [he] can survive” the fallout, raising the spectre of what else it might have been. “The spin agreed upon was this,” she writes. “It had been a flirtation. Nothing more.” There is also very little on her relationship with Lizza, to whom she refers as “the man I did not marry,” though she repeats her accusation (which was made, then withdrawn, in a court filing last year) that he leaked personal information about her to the press, which Lizza denied.

In addition to not being a tell-all, “American Canto” is not a book about Trump, nor is it about politics, as Nuzzi establishes in an author’s note. Rather, “it is a book about life in America as I have lived and observed it, and about the nature of our reality, and about character,” she explains. “It is also a book about love, because everything is about love, and about love of country.” She plays the pretensions of her title straight: she reports that she’s been reading Dante.

It is hard for a reader to know what to make of Nuzzi in this mode. For one thing, her observations of the country veer from banal (it is violent, divided, both captivated and misled by images) to ridiculous (“JonBenét Ramsey said that if you are beautiful you may get killed in service to your country”). Her tone, especially in relation to Kennedy, is that of insistent sincerity. “I loved his brain,” she writes, of the man who was said to have a parasitic brain worm. “I hated the idea of an intruder therein.” With breathtaking grandiosity, she enlists last winter’s Los Angeles wildfires as symbolism for her professional self-destruction.

Trump might have turned everyone around him “into actors,” but Nuzzi seems to have always understood herself to be playing a role. “American Canto” touches briefly on her time as a child actor while growing up in New Jersey. September 11, 2001, was one of the days when her mother was supposed to pick her up early from school to go “to a studio in SoHo or a theater in Midtown” for auditions. That morning, she recalls, “I had dressed in a more considered and colorful way than I ordinarily would. . . . I thought of this as dressing up as a regular child, playing the child.” Later, as a teen-ager, she attempted to launch a music career under the name Livvy. (Although the book does not discuss the episode, Kennedy does call her by that name, as does her father.) Livvy was to be a sort of pop star in quotation marks, “a multi-media character,” according to her MySpace page. A 2010 press release for her first single, “Jailbait,” explained that the song was “about the role of the underaged, hyper-sexualized girl in society,” in its creator’s words. “It’s about pornographic ideals infiltrating our collective consciousness—this obsession with youth and beauty. I’m not saying that any of this is wrong. I’m simply stating that it is.” (“I’ll give you just enough, and leave you wanting more,” she sings, in the pre-chorus.) This is the same spirit of have-it-both-ways half irony that Nuzzi’s critics saw in her reporting on Trump’s Washington—a writer with her eyebrow raised just enough to show she knows better, even as she caters to tawdry appetites.

In “American Canto,” Nuzzi characterizes the public dénouement of her involvement with Kennedy as a “story in which I was cast against my will.” She objects to being seen as a “leopard-clad star reporter”—notwithstanding an old red-carpet photo that ran alongside much of her news coverage, she writes, she generally wore all black. I hesitate to take at face value Lizza’s account of Nuzzi’s behavior, but a specific detail sticks in my mind: he recounts finding a “tabloid-style news story” she wrote in which she describes herself as a “blonde beauty” and “one of the most famous political reporters in America.” It is easy to imagine the narrator of “American Canto” producing fan fiction about herself, because, in many cases, the book reads as if that’s what she’s doing. “He threw himself onto the bed, his pink shirt unbuttoned, revealing my favorite parts of his chest,” Nuzzi writes, of a conversation with Kennedy.

Nuzzi maintains publicly that she does not wish to be on the receiving end of press attention: “That I have made of myself what others have determined to be Good Copy is a horror.” Still, she shows a certain zest for tricks of the trade. She is lavish with explanations of not especially esoteric terms like “opposition research” and “getting ahead of a story.” When a newspaper reporter calls for comment about the Kennedy rumors, Nuzzi tells her it’s “such bullshit”—but only off the record:

She sounded green, and I knew she would not know it was a rookie mistake to allow someone to respond to a spate of claims off the record and all at once. Taken as a whole, I could tell her it was all bullshit. Taken one by one, my response would be more complicated. Speaking off the record, I could say whatever. Speaking on the record, I would say nothing at all.

Nuzzi takes pleasure in the game, even in extremis.

Ultimately, though, “American Canto” requires that she give up the prized role of “star reporter” for “literary memoirist,” and she appears to have decided that the way to play that part is as Joan Didion. The book is rife with Didion pastiche: apocalyptic scenes of Southern California, foreboding incantations. “I mean to tell you as best I can what it was to face this unrealness,” Nuzzi writes. “I mean to tell you that character is not what you are in the end; character is the thing you cannot outrun or outgun that spars with fate all along. I refer now to my own.” As evidence of a center that’s not holding, she includes transcripts of her interviews with Trump. For the photo shoot that ran with a profile in the New York Times, as in the photos that her publisher provided to Vanity Fair, Nuzzi wears sunglasses and sits behind a steering wheel. She has attempted to replicate the Didion image, while replacing cool observation with overheated melodrama.

Disappointingly, she seems to have abandoned the reportorial instincts that were once the basis of her success. “I was interested in characters,” she writes early on. “There were lots of them in politics.” But the character to whom she likely had the most privileged access—Kennedy, referred to only as “the Politician”—remains generic. He is the object of gooey romantic reveries (“His darkness did not scare me anymore; I saw in his darkness softness”) and no particular insight.

For a closer study of a man who now holds alarming power over the lives and health of the American people, readers would do better seeking out “Unscripted,” a new book by Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines. It is mostly a standard-issue celebrity memoir: scrappy childhood, fruitless auditions, a big break, followed by warm encounters with fellow famous people. “Unscripted” makes no claim to literary merit, but, regarding Kennedy, it does have the virtue of providing a portrait grounded in specific, and often repellent, detail. Stories that Hines offers in a spirit of colorful eccentricity have the unintended effect of suggesting a figure who is both monstrous and, perhaps more troublingly, seductive enough to overcome that monstrousness. He is reckless, selfish, and even casually sadistic, whether directing his eight-year-old daughter to run through a swarm of bees or taking a wife who doesn’t like camping on a fifteen-hour hike to a sky-burial cemetery in Bhutan without telling her of his plan. “While I appreciated Bobby’s survival skills,” Hines writes, “I always had a slight fear that one day we’d be in the middle of nowhere, my appendix would burst, and Bobby would happily perform an emergency appendectomy with a pocketknife.”

Hines does not name Nuzzi in the book, but she does describe (briefly and obliquely) the personal fallout of “an ambiguous story about a political journalist.” She writes of her reconciliation with her husband in the veiled language of “soul-searching” and connection. By the book’s end, her loyalty to Kennedy has hardened, and so has her cynicism regarding politics. “In this little universe, they can’t survive without each other,” she writes, of “the press, the candidates, the strategists” who occupy the world of his campaign. “None of them would survive by themselves.” With an outsider’s acuity, she sees through the insular sphere of her husband, Nuzzi, Lizza, and the rest: “They’re all trying to get you to pay attention to them.” ♦