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Did he take me seriously?” Olivia Nuzzi wonders in the midst of her infamous affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr. Nuzzi, then Washington correspondent for New York magazine, has just learned that she and the Politician, as she calls RFK in her new book, may overlap during a visit to Mar-a-Lago. Nuzzi, worried Donald Trump will catch on to the relationship and start spreading rumours, convenes an emergency meeting with the Politician to strategise. RFK doesn’t see the big deal.
So, she agonises “Did he take me seriously?” and reflects that she had “little cause to consider the question before now.”
But once the question did cross Nuzzi’s mind, it imprinted itself on to her psyche. American Canto is part-memoir, part-political analysis. But it is, above all else, a plea by Nuzzi to be taken seriously; as a writer, thinker, person. This is not easy in the best of circumstances when, like Nuzzi, you’re a young and conventionally attractive woman. And, of course, it is even more difficult when, like Nuzzi, you’re a female journalist who made headlines for engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a famous subject. (Or, considering the accusations recently level by Nuzzi’s former fiance, Ryan Lizza, subjects.)
Nuzzi’s looks: the doors they might open, the preconceptions they engender – as well as the misogynistic system they operate within – are a recurring motif in American Canto, albeit one that is frustratingly underexplored. During her first meeting with Trump, she recounts, he looks her up and down and proclaims: “Very young and very beautiful.” Later on, her reporting irritates the president and he publicly insults Nuzzi, calling her “shaky and unattractive.” She is thrown by this, writing how strange she felt it “that the president of the United States had called me both beautiful and unattractive”.
Then, at an exclusive DC party, Nuzzi stands in the kitchen with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, a woman namechecked perhaps because the US does take her seriously, and is accosted by an unidentified female movie star who grabs Nuzzi’s face. “‘Olivia, the secret to life is to be rapeable,’ she told me. ‘You are rapeable.’” She leaves that jarring anecdote to hang there, unexamined.
When, in September 2024, Nuzzi’s affair with the Politician is revealed, the star reporter, a person it’s hard to imagine as naive, seems shocked at how it plays out. “The Politician had orchestrated a narrative in which I was not just reduced to my sexuality but into a hyper-sexualized honeypot,” she writes. Most upsetting, Nuzzi says, are blind quotes suggesting she had used her “appearance as a tool for manipulation while performing my work. Of the lies told about me, this was among the hardest to take.”
Nuzzi is right to be angry about the double standards applied to her; the way she was raked over the coals while a far older, far more powerful man coasted away from the scandal into a plum cabinet position. But American Canto would have been a better book if Nuzzi had interrogated her own behaviour. Instead, she glosses over it. “The Politician had been, briefly, my subject,” she admits. But, she argues, “[h]e had not been my source”. She seems to see no impropriety on her part; she’s just angry her privacy was violated.
Nuzzi is angry, too, at entreaties to dish the dirt that the public (and, one imagines, her publisher) so desperately want. “I thought of that phrase, Tell all, often … Tell what, exactly? Tell why, exactly?” she fumes. Well, one reason, I suppose, might be to sell some books. Tell-alls, the ones that actually tell, tend to sell.
There is not much telling in American Canto, however; or not of anything anyone wants to hear about, anyway. For the first 116 pages, Nuzzi, who, after losing her job at New York magazine has self-exiled to California, barely mentions the Politician. Instead, she writes about Madeleine Ruthven, a screenwriter in the silent era, “hauled before Congress in the McCarthy hearings”, and then, in the next paragraph, about the North American tectonic plate triumphing over the Farallon tectonic plate “one hundred million years ago, give or take”. On the next page a quote from Nietzsche. Then an extract from an interview with Trump. And it goes on and on like this: a series of overwritten American Non Sequiturs whose purpose, it would appear, are to demonstrate that Nuzzi is a serious person with serious thoughts on the state of the United States and “consensus reality” (she is very fond of this phrase) who should be taken seriously.
The affair, when it finally comes up, is crept around. We learn little of interest about RFK, a man who, as secretary of health and human services, is systematically destroying decades of medical progress. We are told instead that: “He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself.” She overintellectualises what is ultimately just a sordid affair. In their intimate moments, for example, the Politician asks Nuzzi for advice and, she says, “I approached his dilemma Socratically.”
While American Canto may suggest otherwise, Nuzzi is not a bad writer. She can paint a vivid scene, pull you into a place. And the places she’s been are important, some of the world’s greatest centres of power. Buried among all the pretension, unnecessary filler and insufferable prose, there are the bones of an excellent book. Perhaps one day, if Nuzzi stops taking herself quite so seriously, we might get to read it.
