The rollout of Olivia Nuzzi’s ‘American Canto’ is a disaster

‘Reporter’ and ‘subject’ are antonyms for a reason: they are different roles that require different skills to excel at. Former Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi learns this the hard way. In the fall of 2024, the writer transitioned from chronicling scandal-ridden, high-profile figures like Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the fact that she became one herself, thanks to a highly publicized (and supposedly non-physical) affair with Kennedy, whom she had previously profiled for New York magazine. Nuzzi has had more than a year to adjust to this new fame and plan her return to public life in the form of “American Canto,” a quasi-memoir published this week by Simon & Schuster. Nuzzi was previously announced as Vanity Fair’s new West Coast editor, though her only byline of her tenure so far is an excerpt from “American Canto.”

But while “American Canto” marks a sharp break from Nuzzi’s earlier prose style, its rollout demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of what is asked of those in the harsh glare of the spotlight. Nuzzi may have given up the role of detached observer, but she refuses to fully embrace the spirit of uninhibited revelation that marks the other extreme. “American Canto” purports to be a message from Trump’s America of the decade. The spectacle surrounding it is real proof that Trump’s shamelessness – or to call it by another name, reality stardom – is not as easy to achieve as it seems.

Nuzzi actually told The Bulwark’s Tim Miller in an interview for his podcast, “I think shame is really important,” saying that she deliberately chose to ignore others’ advice to “be shameless” because “everyone is.” What Nuzzi doesn’t seem to understand is that it’s a bit late for moral hauthor, or to return to the more comfortable territory of detached judgment. Nor does “American Canto,” with its nonsensical, faux-profound statements like “character is that which you cannot outrun or outsmart and that constantly struggles with fate,” read like the work of someone bound primarily by the constraints of shame. The book’s oblique, elliptical style (“this is more meaningful and meaningless than you might think”) isn’t understated—it’s self-flattering.

At least Nuzzi isn’t alone in this situation. Before the Kennedy story blew up, the former journalist was engaged to Ryan Lizza, another longtime chronicler of our nation’s capital and its personalities. After stints at the New Yorker and Politico that both ended bitterly, the former with allegations of sexual misconduct, Lizza is now the owner of Telos Newsa subscription-based newsletter hosted on Substack. It’s this new venture, more than his personal bond with Nuzzi or desire for petty revenge, that explains Lizza’s decision to serialize his side of the story, complete with cliffhanger endings and strategically placed paywalls.

Although Lizza’s posts accuse Nuzzi of serious professional sins, such as killing negative stories about Kennedy on the politician’s behalf, beating her with the more limited revelations in “American Canto” and allegedly ordering an illegal recording of Trump at Mar-a-Lago, there is something rich about Lizza’s attempt to position herself on higher ethical ground. In this context, Lizza behaves no more like a journalist who just sets out the facts than his ex-fiance. He is, in modern parlance, a creator – an independent entrepreneur whose stocks and trades are the attention he can attract, which is significant at this point. Nuzzi and Lizza may no longer be in a relationship, but they’ve embarked on the same semi-involuntary career change.

So far, Lizza has proven more adept at this shared endeavor, if not at positioning herself as a victim. Semafor reports this that his first message, a deliberate bait-and-switch that culminated in the sensational claim that Nuzzi Also had an inappropriate relationship with former Republican presidential candidate Mark Sanford and attracted nearly three-quarters of a million readers. You can never mistake Lizza’s blog posts for carefully vetted reports; a tease that hinted at a revelation about Trump’s assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, followed by an immediate admission that Lizza couldn’t substantiate anything worth publishing, felt particularly cheap and disingenuous. What she Doing what Nuzzi refuses to say so far are lurid details: direct quotes from Kennedy’s erotic messages; the full text of a strategy memo Nuzzi wrote for his doomed campaign; names of new characters to feed our insatiable appetite for drama. Sanford’s mic drop is in stark contrast to Nuzzi’s insistence on referring to Kennedy only as “the politician,” which creates no mystery and much annoyance.

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

Nuzzi told Miller that “American Canto” is not “an attempt to brand myself in a certain way,” a self-evidently preposterous claim belied by Joan Didion’s unconvincing drag-up — 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 from “American Canto,” accompanied by an “abstract nude” illustration. Traditionally, editors in journalism (including those on the West Coast) have often been faceless figures, tasked with providing reporting from behind the scenes rather than effectively covering themselves. But right now, Nuzzi has little to offer except her own story. ‘American Canto’ is not a path back to legitimacy, as Nuzzi seems to hope; To use the book’s favorite metaphor, fire, it is the final burning of a bridge she crossed long ago. There’s a similar comedy in which Lizza appeals to credibility props like “primary sources” while blogging about his own breakup.

With every word that these two publish, they are further away from classic reportage and closer to the role of influencer, the most modern profession that works to make money from the enormous amount of eyeballs. In a way, their story is an extreme version of a broader situation in the media: both established media and start-up platforms want to vote with ‘personal brands’, but are caught flat-footed when this groundbreaking pops up in their faces. This is a bigger problem for the Vanity Fairs of the world than it is for the Substacks, who can shrug their shoulders and invoke Section 230 while Condé Nast conducts an internal review. For the writers themselves, however, there is no way out but to push through it – there is no point in pretending, to themselves or to others, that there is some higher purpose at work here than personal ambition or revenge. We live in a country ruled by a game show host. If you really want to capture the moment, it’s best to fulfill your assigned role with gusto, even if that means you’re the bad guy.