Olivia Nuzzi's Tell-Nothing Memoir

"One of the many delights of America is that its geography is also a vocabulary. If I say "Portland, Oregon," or "the Hamptons," or "Appalachia," the reader knows instantly which stereotypes are being invoked: the middle-class Maoist, the summering WASP, the hick. This shorthand allows American authors to invest their prose with extra meaning, just by using it somewhere. The rollout for Olivia Nuzzi's new book, American Canto, has therefore leaned heavily into the elementary turbulence of California."

"Nuzzi immolated her career as a political writer at New York magazine by becoming romantically entangled with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after she wrote a profile of him in 2023. Kennedy-a former heroin addict turned vaccine skeptic whom Donald Trump later installed as head of the Department of Health and Human Services-was then running for president. When Nuzzi fled west after the affair became public, the Palisades started burning, too."

"American Canto is Nuzzi's attempt to elevate a grubby affair to the status of the mythic, to transmute the base metal of Page Six sexting stories into the gold of literary reflections on the political moment. "A very, very good outcome would be if the book was received with open minds in 20 or 30 years," she told a different Times reporter a few days ago."

American geography functions as a compact vocabulary of regional stereotypes that writers use to add meaning. Olivia Nuzzi transformed a professional scandal—an affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former addict turned vaccine skeptic and presidential candidate—into a memoir, relocating to California amid wildfires. American Canto and its publicity leaned into dramatic imagery: a sun boiling red, surrounding flames, moody cliffside photographs, and echoes of Joan Didion's territory. The narrative seeks to transmute tabloid detail into mythic reflection and to be reassessed more favorably decades hence. Media framing and public reaction strongly shape contemporary reception.

Read at The Atlantic