Embattled Olivia Nuzzi receives brutal reviews of highly anticipated book

Journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s newest book was met with brutal criticism for not being the “tell-all” readers wanted it to be.

Nuzzi, a political writer, parted ways with New York magazine last year after multiple reports found she had a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while she was covering the 2024 election. Nuzzi’s personal life has been in the national spotlight since the discovery of the affair and her later break up with fellow journalist Ryan Lizza—who has since published numerous blog posts about the situation.

Critics sharply lambasted Nuzzi’s book, “American Canto,” for not being a “tell-all memoir” of her career and relationship with Kennedy. Slate magazine’s Scaachi Koul delivered a scathing takedown of Nuzzi’s book in a review titled, “Olivia Nuzzi’s Book Has the Audacity to Be Boring.”

In an excerpt shared to social media platform X, Koul calls the book “illegible.” Koul said the book “offers almost no insight into Kennedy as a person, as a politician, as a figure helping guide our collective political moment, or even into Nuzzi herself as a journalist once widely lauded and now largely seen as embarrassing.”

Koul then mocked Nuzzi for spending time discussing random topics, like the making of the American flag, during her book.

“But hey, at least she devotes countless pages to the American flag. She writes about it being sewn, about it being raised, about its pigmentation: ‘The blur of colors, the flash of red, of blue, of white, stretched and folded, pulled apart, undefined yet unmistakable, the flag.’ It’s like a children’s book about good old red, white, and blue-except it was written by Joan Didion in a black turtleneck, and it f—ing sucks,” Koul writes.

The book also received negative reviews from The New York Times, The Atlantic and The Washington Post, with critics saying it wasn’t forthcoming about her personal life.

According to The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg, Nuzzi said New York magazine gave her the option “to save her career by coming clean publicly” with a tell-all.

“If that deal was really on the table, she didn’t take it then and she doesn’t take it now,” Goldberg said of the book. “Instead, in ‘American Canto,’ she makes anyone hungry for prurient details trudge through a grandiose postmodern pastiche that attempts to situate her personal catastrophe in the context of our collective one.”

The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis also had some tough criticism, arguing that the book was “not honest.”

“American Canto was written too early, and too quickly. It is a first draft, hastily typed into a smartphone; a bargaining chip to gain favorable news coverage; a down payment on a post-scandal career. A tell-all memoir? Ha. This is a tell-nothing memoir. Instead, it is a portrait of losing your soul—of discovering, as Nuzzi quotes from Nietzsche, that when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” Lewis writes.

The Washington Post’s Becca Rothfeld wrote: “You shouldn’t write a memoir unless you are willing to make yourself look foolish and pathetic. Nuzzi breaks this cardinal rule, flattering herself by admitting to only the chicest kinds of disintegration.”

Nuzzi brushed off some of the criticism of her book during an interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller.

“I wasn’t really trying to do anything in this book other than write something honest and be honest about my experiences and how it felt and what had happened and how I was kind of putting it in context,” Nuzzi told Miller.

“American Canto” was released on Dec. 2. According to journalist Benjamin Ryan, Nuzzi’s book release day was “not good.”

“I generally find that a halfway decent debut on Amazon for a book by someone who is not that well known is about 8,000 on the top books list. Nuzzi is at 12,762,” Ryan posted on X.