Olivia Nuzzi’s Disastrous Memoir Rollout Is a Doomed Attempt to Have It Both Ways

“Reporter” and “subject” are antonyms for a reason: They’re different roles that require different skill sets to excel within. The former Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi is learning this the hard way. In the fall of 2024, the writer went from chronicling scandal-ridden, attention-getting figures like Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to becoming one herself, thanks to a widely publicized (and allegedly nonphysical) affair with Kennedy, whom she had previously profiled for New York magazine. Nuzzi has had more than a year to adjust to this new notoriety and plot her return to public life in the form of “American Canto,” a quasi-memoir published this week by Simon & Schuster. Nuzzi had previously been announced as the new West Coast editor of Vanity Fair, though her sole byline of her tenure to date is an “American Canto” excerpt.

But while “American Canto” does mark a sharp break from Nuzzi’s previous prose style, its rollout displays a profound misunderstanding of what’s demanded from those in the limelight’s harsh glare. Nuzzi may have relinquished the role of aloof observer, yet she refuses to fully embrace the spirit of uninhibited disclosure that marks the opposite extreme. “American Canto” purports to be a dispatch from Trump’s America at the decade mark. The spectacle surrounding it is really proof that Trumpian shamelessness — or to call it by another name, reality stardom — isn’t as easy to pull off as it looks.

In fact, Nuzzi told Tim Miller of The Bulwark in an interview for his podcast, “I think shame is really important,” saying she intentionally chose to ignore others’ advice to “be shameless” because “everyone else is.” What Nuzzi seems not to comprehend is that it’s a little late for moral hauteur, or to return to the more comfortable terrain of detached appraisal. Nor does “American Canto,” with its nonsensical, faux-profound proclamations like “character is the thing you cannot outrun or outgun that spars with fate all along,” read like the work of a person especially bound by the strictures of shame. The book’s oblique, elliptical style (“this is more meaningful and more meaningless than you might think”) is not demure — it’s self-flattering.

At least Nuzzi is not alone in this limbo. Before the Kennedy story blew up, the erstwhile journalist was engaged to Ryan Lizza, another longtime chronicler of our nation’s capitol and its personalities. After stints at the New Yorker and Politico that each ended acrimoniously, the former with allegations of sexual misconduct, Lizza is now the proprietor of Telos News, a subscription-based newsletter hosted on Substack. It is this new venture, even more than his personal connection to Nuzzi or desire for petty vengeance, that explains Lizza’s decision to serialize his side of the story, complete with cliffhanger endings and strategically deployed paywalls.

Though Lizza’s dispatches accuse Nuzzi of grave professional sins like killing negative stories about Kennedy on the politician’s behalf, beating her to the more limited revelations made in “American Canto,” and allegedly commissioning an illegal recording of Trump at Mar-a-Lago, there’s something rich about Lizza attempting to position himself on higher ethical ground. In this context, Lizza isn’t acting as a just-the-facts journalist anymore than his ex-fiancée is. He is, in the modern parlance, a creator — an independent business owner whose stock and trade is the attention he’s able to attract, which for the moment is considerable. Nuzzi and Lizza may no longer be in a relationship, but they’ve embarked on the same semi-involuntary career pivot. 

Thus far, Lizza has proven more adept at this shared pursuit, if not at positioning himself as a victim. Semafor reported that his first dispatch, a deliberate bait-and-switch that culminated with the sensational allegation that Nuzzi also had an inappropriate relationship with former Republican presidential candidate Mark Sanford, attracted nearly three-quarters of a million readers. One could never confuse Lizza’s blog posts for carefully vetted reports; a tease hinting at a bombshell revelation about the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania, followed by an immediate admission Lizza couldn’t substantiate anything worth publishing, felt particularly cheap and dishonest. What they do deliver that Nuzzi thus far refuses to are lurid specifics: direct quotes from Kennedy’s erotic missives; the complete text of a strategy memo Nuzzi wrote for his doomed campaign; names of new characters to feed our insatiable appetite for drama. The Sanford mic drop stands in contrast to Nuzzi’s insistence on referring to Kennedy only as “the Politician,” producing no mystery and a great deal of annoyance.

The failures of “American Canto” have already been catalogued in a fusillade of savage reviews. But they’re perhaps best illustrated in contrast with Nuzzi’s most recent piece of writing: a list of bullet points titled “Signs Your Book Rollout Has Gone Awry,” run behind the paywall of the popular newsletter Feed Me. (Two can play at this Substack game, it seems.) The list was only Nuzzi’s second piece of press around the book, after a New York Times profile penned by Jacob Bernstein and before her conversation with Miller. Where “American Canto” reads like it was written on her phone — as she told Bernstein it had been — in the derogatory sense, “Signs Your Book Rollout Has Gone Awry” is a better-case-scenario for a Notes App dump. A typical entry reads: “It seems a positive development that Tina Brown describes your ‘pretentious’ book as ‘Ezra Pound meets Barbie.’” It’s as casual, concise and amusingly self-aware as “American Canto” is belabored and humorless. Some of her answers in a Q&A with Feed Me’s readers had a similar bite; when asked about the long-term impact of existing in the MAGA orbit, Nuzzi replied, in the artful understatement of the year, “Well, it couldn’t have been very good.” I laughed!

Nuzzi told Miller that “American Canto” is not “an effort to brand myself in any particular way,” a self-evidently ridiculous claim belied by unconvincing Joan Didion drag — driving around Malibu in a Ford Mustang — staged for the benefit of a New York Times photographer. This performance of self-seriousness coincided with Nuzzi’s Vanity Fair debut, an excerpt of “American Canto” accompanied by an “abstract nude” illustration. Traditionally, editors in journalism (including West Coast ones) are often anonymous figures, tasked with commissioning coverage from behind the scenes rather than effectively covering themselves. But as of right now, Nuzzi has little to offer except her own story. “American Canto” is not a road back into legitimacy, as Nuzzi seems to hope; to use the book’s favorite metaphor of fire, it’s a final burning of a bridge she crossed long ago. There’s a similar comedy to Lizza invoking credibility buttresses like “primary sources” while he’s blogging through his own breakup.

Every word these two publish puts them further away from classical reportage and closer to the role of influencer, that most modern of professions that works to monetize sheer volume of eyeballs. In a way, their saga is an extreme version of a broader predicament in media: establishment outlets and upstart platforms alike want voices with “personal brands,” but get caught flat-footed when this boundary pushing blows up in their face. This is a bigger problem for the Vanity Fairs of the world than the Substacks, who can shrug and invoke Section 230 while Condé Nast conducts an internal review. For the writers themselves, however, there’s no way out but through — no point in pretending, to oneself or to others, that any loftier goal is at work here than personal ambition or vendettas. We live in a nation governed by a game show host. If you’re really aiming to capture the moment, best to embrace one’s assigned role with gusto, even if that means you’re the villain.