A review of American Canto by Olivia Nuzzi, 320 pages, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster (December 2025)

What would you expect from a book by a political journalist that contains the following passage?

I had thought it a blessing and still do that when I entered the profession, at the height of what was determined the personal essay boom for young women writers, I could not participate because I did not care to write of my own life and experiences because I did not find any of it terribly interesting and certainly not more interesting than whatever I might learn about the world from other people and their experiences. Now as then, I write to establish what can be established.

You might expect straightforward reporting on politics. You might expect exclusive quotations and new evidence from meticulously researched archives. You might expect a central thesis or argument, which an eighth grader could tell you is generally needed in any piece of nonfiction. You probably would not expect extended first-person meditations on the Pacific Coast Highway and other parts of California. Nor intimate moments with “the Politician,” the pseudonym given to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., prominent vaccine sceptic, secretary of health and human services, and alleged paramour of the writer.

Olivia Nuzzi is a 32-year-old journalist who wrote (and wrote well) for publications like Politico, the Washington Post, Esquire, and New York magazine. Hired as a wunderkind columnist by the Daily Beast in 2010 when she was still a Fordham University student, she was dispatched to cover presidential campaigns and first attracted notice and acclaim with her articles about the rise of Donald Trump in 2016. The following year, she was appointed New York’s Washington correspondent, and the year after that, she was granted an audience with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. As the 2024 election approached, Nuzzi’s professional and personal future was looking promising—she was still young, ambitious, attractive, successful, and contracted to write a book with her fiancé and fellow political journalist Ryan Lizza.

This spectacular climb then took a spectacular nosedive in September 2024, when it emerged that Nuzzi had engaged in an “emotional and digital” relationship with RFK while she was reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign in which he was a candidate. The exact parameters of that relationship remain fuzzy: RFK has flatly denied any sort of relationship, insisting that he met Nuzzi only once for an interview; Nuzzi maintains that she “adored his ‘particular complications and particular darkness,’” but that they “were not sleeping together.” This is all further complicated by two bits of literature: a Substack serialisation of the whole saga by Lizza (who is no longer Nuzzi’s fiancé), in which he accuses Nuzzi of sleeping with RFK, and Nuzzi’s new memoir American Canto, which arrived on 2 December and serves up a lot more info about Nuzzi’s feelings for “The Politician.”

Vanity Fair hired Nuzzi to be its West Coast editor in September and reproduced a lengthy extract from her memoir in its pages. But neither that preview nor the book that followed was at all well-received, and on 5 December, following Lizza’s further disclosures about Nuzzi’s various indiscretions, Nuzzi and Vanity Fair’s publisher Condé Nast issued a joint statement announcing that, “in the best interest of the magazine,” her contract would be allowed to “expire at the end of the year.”

The media reaction to this giant mess has run the gamut. Some people have gleefully pilloried Nuzzi, others have glamourised her, and still others have taken the opportunity to flex their own rhetorical muscles in delightful ways. There are fetid details that do not merit a canto (nor even a quatrain or haiku) here but you are free to Google those if you wish. The gist is that Nuzzi blew an RFK-sized hole into the Great Monument of Journalism and Especially Female Journalists. Of course, she does have a few scattered defenders, but the general feeling in my circles is that Nuzzi whiffed this one.

Nuzzi’s allies complain that much of the criticism she has received has been excessive and that it is unfair and/or sexist that her career lies in ruins while RFK Jr seems to have suffered no professional or personal consequences at all. But there are at least three reasons for this lopsided distribution of consequences. First, RFK has kept his mouth shut, while Nuzzi hands more kindling to the reputation arsonists every time she opens hers. Second, RFK was already understood to be a sonofabitch and a philanderer before this scandal broke, so his alleged affair with Nuzzi is really just business as usual (his philandering seems to have been a precipitating factor in the suicide of his first wife). Third, Nuzzi really is the party most at fault here.