The reporter’s affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr raised a whole host of questions, few of which get answers in this pretentious memoir
D
id he take me seriously?” Olivia Nuzzi wonders in the midst of her infamous affair with Robert F Kennedy Jr. Nuzzi, then Washington correspondent for New York magazine, has just learned that she and the Politician, as she calls RFK in her new book, may overlap during a visit to Mar-a-Lago. Nuzzi, worried Donald Trump will catch on to the relationship and start spreading rumours, convenes an emergency meeting with the Politician to strategise. RFK doesn’t see the big deal.
So, she agonises “Did he take me seriously?” and reflects that she had “little cause to consider the question before now.”
But once the question did cross Nuzzi’s mind, it imprinted itself on to her psyche. American Canto is part-memoir, part-political analysis. But it is, above all else, a plea by Nuzzi to be taken seriously; as a writer, thinker, person. This is not easy in the best of circumstances when, like Nuzzi, you’re a young and conventionally attractive woman. And, of course, it is even more difficult when, like Nuzzi, you’re a female journalist who made headlines for engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a famous subject. (Or, considering the accusations recently level by Nuzzi’s former fiance, Ryan Lizza, subjects.)
