Writing Her Way Out

With American Canto, Olivia Nuzzi puts herself back in the headlines—perhaps not in the way she intended.

Halfway through American Canto, the new book by Olivia Nuzzi, the political reporter, an unnamed editor at an unnamed magazine suggests to her, “You could write your way out of it.” The “it” refers to the scandalous revelation that Nuzzi had been engaged in a “digital relationship” for months with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she profiled for New York magazine in 2023. The affair spanned the height of election season and, in October of last year, Nuzzi left her position as Washington correspondent after she was found to have violated the magazine’s conflict-of-interest standards. Since then, it seems that Nuzzi has taken her old boss’s advice seriously.

American Canto, which publishes tomorrow, recasts the Kennedy scandal on Nuzzi’s terms. Cobbling together memoir and her own Trump-era political reportage, the book is billed as a comeback of sorts. In the sense that it puts Nuzzi back in the conversation, it hasn’t failed.