Here are the most scathing lines from the reviews of Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto.
Jessie Gaynor December 2, 2025
There’s nothing brave or noble about admitting that I am completely engrossed by the ongoing Olivia Nuzzi saga. It’s not just that it’s tawdry, or that all the players are, to varying degrees, despicable. It’s also the Wider Implications, for journalism, and for the current political reality (though I would argue that neither of them needed any help from Olivia Nuzzi on the Looking Dire front). But, to quote Becca Rothfeld’s review of Nuzzi’s newly released American Canto, “You shouldn’t write a memoir unless you are willing to make yourself look foolish and pathetic.” (This isn’t a memoir, it’s a blog post, but I think the point stands.) My prurient, gossip-hungry interest in all the details of the thing both foolish and pathetic. What can I say—I’m waiting for a few holds to come through on Libby and I need the excitement.
I do, however, draw the line at reading the book itself, mostly because the reviews (all pans at current accounting) point out that it’s almost entirely juiceless. But since I appreciate a good pan almost as much as I love an extremely messy scandal in which no one is remotely innocent, I’ve collected some of the most scathing lines from the critics’ takes on American Canto.
I hesitate to take at face value Lizza’s account of Nuzzi’s behavior, but a specific detail sticks in my mind: he recounts finding a “tabloid-style news story” she wrote in which she describes herself as a “blonde beauty” and “one of the most famous political reporters in America.” It is easy to imagine the narrator of “American Canto” producing fan fiction about herself, because, in many cases, the book reads as if that’s what she’s doing. “He threw himself onto the bed, his pink shirt unbuttoned, revealing my favorite parts of his chest,” Nuzzi writes, of a conversation with Kennedy. –Molly Fisher ( The New Yorker)
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On Page 15 of this 303-page bafflement we get to the astrology (“a Gemini nation, under a Gemini ruler”). At the book’s midpoint, we learn the author and Kennedy were born under the same kind of January Capricorn gobbledygook. “Do you think this means we’re compatible?” the man the author calls the Politician in these pages, who IRL oversees the health care of more than 300 million Americans, asked her. –Alexandra Jacobs ( The New York Times)
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If there’s such a thing as hate-reading, there must also be gross-out-reading. Nuzzi’s account of what attracted her to RFK, who’s 39 years her senior, supplies a few of these titillations. She praises his chest and his voice — “to me a fire crackling.” –Lily Janiak ( San Francisco Chronicle)
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[A]t its worst, Nuzzi’s prose is not just stilted or repetitive. It is ostentatiously mannered, itching at every turn to announce its showy lyricism[…]
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. She tells us that she didn’t eat or sleep, that she grew remote and aloof, that she lit a lot of candles, drove around California in aMustang convertible and had very glamorous breakdowns while gazing wistfully at the sky. She is wholly unwilling to expose the heart of her attraction to an object as unlikely as RFK Jr. –Becca Rothfeld ( The Washington Post)
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Nuzzi is too old to be absolved from these moral, political, and journalistic sins. –Joan Walsh ( The Nation)
I know I ought to be ashamed…
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‘Debacle of epic proportions’: Nuzzi book flops in first week
The former star magazine writer’s “American Canto” has been panned by critics and seen weak sales.
Olivia Nuzzi arrives for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 29, 2023. | Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
By Daniel Lippman12/11/2025 12:29 PM EST
Journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s new book “American Canto” sold only 1,165 hardcover copies in its first week on the shelves, according to new data compiled by tracker NPDBookScan.
The book was savaged in reviews, with the New York Times calling it “self-serious and altogether disappointing” and the Washington Post writing that she “tries and fails to save her reputation in the book.”
“I think there’s a broad understanding her credibility has been shredded and the idea of her as a reliable narrator in telling any story, even hers, not many readers are going to believe that,” said a publishing industry insider granted anonymity to speak candidly. The person called it a “publishing debacle of epic proportions” and said that given Nuzzi’s earlier reputation — she was a star magazine writer who was given glowing treatment in a Times profile last month — the sales expectation would be at least 5,000 hardcover copies in its first week.
BookScan data captures around 70 percent of hardcover sales and does not track e-book and audio uploads.
Since Nuzzi started promoting the book, her former fiancé, journalist Ryan Lizza, has published a series of Substack posts describing her relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and alleged ethical breaches. Lizza, a former POLITICO staffer, issued his fifth installment on Wednesday night. Nuzzi has called Lizza’s writings “harmful revenge porn”; he says she can’t handle the truth and so is blaming him for her failings.
“Heads should roll over the disaster, whether it’s crisis PR consultants involved or editors,” the publishing industry insider added. “It’s a disaster from start to finish.”
A person close to Nuzzi said the book “had a respectable first week” for a new author “despite an unprecedented and vengeful harassment campaign aimed solely at ruining the book’s release.” The person added that the book had a short pre-sale window.
As Nuzzi told the Times last month, she was operating with the belief that “a very good outcome” would be if the book was considered valuable in ten, twenty, or thirty years; she knew the present moment might reject her. “I’m detached from the outcome,” she said.
Nuzzi referred a request for comment to her publisher, Simon and Schuster. A spokesperson for the publisher declined to comment.
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