Olivia Nuzzi on Her New Book ‘American Canto’

Olivia Nuzzi loved him. She loved the politician, even though she was a political reporter and he was then a presidential candidate she had written about. She loved his eyes, “blue as the flame.” She loved that “the sight of something as trivial as a rose” could move him to tears. She loved his insatiable appetites and his “particular complications and particular darkness.”

But she said “I love you” only after he said it first. He called her “Livvy” and wrote her poems. He said he wanted her to have his baby. He promised to take a bullet for her.

This is what Nuzzi writes in her book, “American Canto,” never naming the politician who readers will deduce is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

At the height of the 2024 presidential campaign, Nuzzi seemed to have a digital affair with Kennedy that revolved around texts and phone calls. The revelation derailed her career, led to her firing at New York magazine, and precipitated a very public explosion of her relationship with another prominent political journalist. Kennedy tried to brush her off, saying he had met her just once for the “hit piece” she wrote and threw his support behind Donald J. Trump, eventually becoming a cabinet secretary in his administration.

You could argue that referring to Kennedy and other players in the book by monikers like “the politician” is literary. It also allows her to construct a world where everyone is a sketch and proof is beside the point. Nuzzi makes clear in the book that she realizes there are people who will disagree with her version of events. She does not try to prove them. When I asked, for example, whether the text messages with Kennedy still exist, she said, “I don’t have anything to say about that.”

Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment.

Sitting under a pine tree in Los Angeles one night last month, Nuzzi gave up the pretense of trying to explain the unexplainable and reached for a joke for the people who simply could not fathom what came over her.

“Maybe it was the vaccines.”

The Edge of Oblivion

Nuzzi, 32, lives in a tiny house in the heart of Malibu where lizards crawl into her kitchen and the King James Bible and “The Divine Comedy” — two books she was reading while she was writing “American Canto” — sit on her dining room table. She drives around in a white Mustang convertible, like a Lana Del Rey song come to life.

She fled to the West Coast a year ago when the nation seemed to be “up my skirt,” as she puts it, aided by paparazzi who were determined to keep her in the news. Here she can hike in peace, though she feels hunted. Drones fly overhead; she wonders if it’s merely a coincidence.

Over a decade, Nuzzi cared less about breaking news than about exposing the foibles and vanity of Trump and the people within his orbit. The president sat down with her repeatedly, despite the fact that she often did not exactly make him look good.

In the book, she describes Trump as a monster who “succeeded by making even those who said they loathed him behave sometimes quite like him.”

Why was he so willing to keep talking to her?

“I certainly don’t think he’s a careful reader,” she said, sucking on a vape stick as she drove toward her “favorite rock,” off the Pacific Coast Highway. “There’s a clip once where I said something to the effect of: He loves attention, women and magazines. In that order.”

Nuzzi tried to convey that this comment was a joke, but she cannot entirely discount the possibility that being a woman and looking like the modern iteration of a Hitchcock blonde contributed to the access she got.

She steered the Mustang onto a patch of dirt on the side of the road and put on a black leather jacket that she pulled from the back seat. The rock she loved was at the edge of a vertiginous cliff, where water rolled and crashed.

Throughout the book, she writes of precipices, both real and metaphorical. Trump, at the top of the escalator; the distortions at the edge of a black hole; the moment before sleep when you realize you’re falling in love; the moment you’re sitting before your boss about to be confronted with “the rumors.”

Which, of course, were true.

The book — most of which she punched into her phone while hiking — is not exactly a memoir, though much of it is about her decade in journalism before she met Kennedy and her early years growing up on the Navesink River in New Jersey. Her father was a union man with the Department of Sanitation and her mother was a former catalog model who drank way too much and had what Nuzzi describes in the book as a “borderline personality gaze.”

Like Trump, Nuzzi attended Fordham University. He transferred to Wharton, the business school at the University of Pennsylvania. She got an internship with Anthony Weiner’s 2013 campaign for mayor. She then wrote a piece about what a mess it was and took it to The Daily News. When the story was published, Weiner’s spokeswoman, Barbara Morgan, dismissed her to other press outlets as a “slutbag.” They are now close friends.

Two years later, at 22, she was writing full time for The Daily Beast about Trump, hitting Trump Tower during the day and reading Jimmy Breslin at night — a crash course in the school of journalism where a writer doubles as star witness. She parlayed that effort into a job at New York magazine, becoming at 24 its Washington correspondent, the first time in the magazine’s 50-year history anyone held such a post.

Her pieces were filled with absurd details. In 2019, she described Rudy Giuliani showing up to an early afternoon interview with his fly unzipped and drinking Bloody Marys. In 2021, she quoted the Senate candidate Mehmet Oz and his wife talking about her after they failed to realize that they hadn’t ended their phone conversation. “We’ve got to go lock our door,” he says, seemingly fearful that Nuzzi was going to break into his campaign headquarters.

And in 2024, just days after President Biden gave a career-ending performance at a CNN presidential debate with Trump, Nuzzi published a piece presenting the silence around Biden’s increasing frailty as a kind of “Weekend at Bernie’s”-style cover-up with national ramifications. He was so “not there,” she wrote, that “a sex scandal might help him right now.”

Certain quarters of the Democratic Party were furious. A number of New York magazine’s staff members were too. They wondered if she’d gone MAGA on them. But according to Kara Swisher, whose podcast “Pivot” appears on Vox Media, New York’s parent company: “Everything she said about Biden was true. Her writing was over and beyond the best political reporting out there.”

Take a Bullet

“A politician’s greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one,” Nuzzi writes in her book. “And what is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.”

Nuzzi says in the book that her romantic entanglement — if one can refer to a digital relationship that way — with “the politician” began after she wrote about him, in an article published in November 2023.

She writes that the first few times Kennedy said he loved her, she did not say it back. Yet she knew she felt the same. “I love him, I thought. Oh no. I love him so much.” They spoke often and were intimate enough for her to see him flossing his teeth, his dopp kit overflowing with prescriptions.

She writes that despite being “sober” for decades, Kennedy told her that he still uses psychedelics, and even smoked dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a powerful drug on which people are known to have what feel like near-death experiences. She told him she “liked uppers. I told him that I took Adderall.”

They chose favorite parts of each other, she writes: He chose her mouth. She chose his nose. They shared a “common language, common skepticisms, common ideas about what was beautiful, common beliefs about what was valuable.” She didn’t care that he was 39 years older than her. She liked him just the way he was. They both “moved through the world with amused detachment and deep sensitivity, contradictions that worked somehow in concert.”

She describes providing him with advice about how to manage campaign issues, including the impending news that Kennedy dropped a bear carcass in Central Park.

And when his campaign finally combusted in August 2024 and he sought an alternate path to power, she asked him how he felt visualizing himself onstage endorsing the Democratic candidate. “Nauseous,” he replied.

When she then asked him how he would feel about endorsing the Republican candidate, his answer was the same. Yet he had the “hope” he would be able to “negotiate for influence” and the time to do so “was now.”

Nuzzi did not want to discuss Kennedy’s tenure as secretary of health and human services. “I don’t have any interest in offering punditry,” she said.

But in the end, she helped make sure he could get the power he sought. His alleged promise to “take a bullet” for her turned into a request that she take the bullet. She claims in the book that as news broke of their relationship in September 2024, he told her, “If it’s just sex, I can survive it.” She told him she would do whatever he needed her to do.

Sitting behind the wheel, shortly after Nancy Sinatra’s version of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” played on her Spotify, she said the two are no longer in touch. “I haven’t spoken to him in a year,” she said.

The Wildfire

How her relationship to Kennedy became public is not entirely clear, though looking back it seems inevitable, given the worlds they inhabit. Nuzzi blames Lizza, whom she had told while they were still living together.

Swisher, whom Nuzzi describes in the book as a mentor, eventually found out about Kennedy and told senior leadership at New York magazine. “She just needed to come clean and she never did,” Swisher said. “It was a betrayal of the audience.”

Nuzzi was fired a month later, in October 2024. That same month, she filed for a protective order against Lizza, claiming that he had hacked into her devices to find damaging information about her as part of a plot to destroy her reputation. Lizza denied all of this, and Nuzzi ultimately dropped the order, saying in her motion to dismiss that Lizza had “successfully exploited the media interest in these proceedings to create an even bigger spectacle.” She still declines to present evidence that he had, in fact, done those things.

In response to questions, Lizza wrote in a text that Nuzzi had made “false and defamatory allegations” and that she “refused to defend” them.

From the Ashes

Nuzzi and Lizza had long owed a book to Avid Reader Press that they were going to write together about the 2020 election. Someone was presumably going to have to pay back the advance they had received from Avid Reader if nothing was written.

But she says the decision to write “American Canto” was about wanting to “complete a thought” and felt a book would be the right place to do it. “I had a healthy appreciation for the fact that what had happened was not purely a tragedy.”

Meanwhile, with characteristic instincts for the loci of power, she began going to San Vicente Bungalows and the Sunset Tower Hotel. It was there, last July, that she had dinner with Mark Guiducci, Vanity Fair’s new global director of editorial content. They “closed the place down,” he said, talking about the old glamour of magazines and how to reinvent that in the digital era.

Soon enough, he received permission from his corporate higher-ups at Condé Nast to hire her as Vanity Fair’s new West Coast editor. It wasn’t until later that they learned she was about to land back in the news with the publication of “American Canto.”

Earlier this fall, Nuzzi found out that her book was scheduled to come out within days of “Unscripted,” the new memoir from Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines. Avid Reader pushed back the release of “American Canto” by three weeks with the hope that their book tours would not turn into a she said/she said.

About the turn her life has taken, Nuzzi said there is no point in expressing wistfulness about what could or should be, rather than what is. But in the book, she describes seeing a flock of drones on Mulholland Highway and feeling “a pang of regret that I could not go out there to report.”

Over the past year, she found herself interviewing strangers, and missed, she said, “relating to the world and everyone in it that way.” She still daydreamed about ways she would cover politics now.

So last week, as the New York mayoral returns came in and she sat at Mel’s Drive-In in Santa Monica, she was focused on the current mayor.

“Someone has got to be covering Eric Adams tonight,” she said.

What better way to memorialize Zohran Mamdani’s win than to capture it through the eyes of the evening’s ultimate loser, its incumbent mayor?

I made a joke about how Adams had seemingly thrown away his life just to fly business class.

Nuzzi shrugged.

“I destroyed mine for less,” she said.