the appeal of madness
again: on olivia nuzzi & rfk jr.
Not that I ever doubted him, but Ferris Bueller was right—life does move pretty fast. Less than a week ago I was complaining about the embarrassing boyfriends discourse, annoyed that we’re now shaming people for being in loving relationships and sharing it with their friends. Now, fresh off the most recent cycle of Olivia Nuzzi/RFK Jr. news, I’m like … you know what? Let’s run that Vogue article back. I think I may have been too quick to judge. Maybe shame does have a bigger role to play in all this.
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There are a lot more of you reading Hmm today than there were last year and also I’m concerned that our collective long-term memory is a fledgling, fleeting, fallible thing, so as a brief reminder, I did write about the little scandal last year:
And listen, as someone who grew up on HBO shows and went to grad school, I have been attracted to my fair share of questionable men. But I have looked inward and I hope to God it won’t later be considered hubris when I say: I would rather live through the heartbreak of daily Bennifer break-up announcements for the rest of my life than to even toy with the idea of letting anything but distance come between myself and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
I guess Goonies never do say die, because here I am again writing about these two.
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On Monday, I watched Die, My Love (2025), a film about how you can have perfect hair even as you’re losing your mind.
The following morning, I finally read the Times’ Nuzzi profile, published a little over a year after the big RFK Jr. affair reveal and in anticipation of Nuzzi’s upcoming memoir, American Canto (Simon & Schuster, if you’re reading this, a galley would find a warm and enthusiastic welcome in my home/arms/heart/inbox).
Anyway, this is what Nuzzi looks like now:
And listen, it’s not that I’m necessarily drawing parallels between Jennifer Lawrence’s character, one suffering from postpartum depression and living in an isolated Georgia farmhouse, and Nuzzi, someone rebuilding her life after being unceremoniously fired from her prominent job as New York’s Washington correspondent, now living in a “tiny Malibu house.”
But is it my fault if the parallels between two similarly blonde-tressed-thirty-somethings sometimes draw themselves?
I’m just saying: there is something deeply relatable, not to mention very American-coded, about maintaining the illusion of stability, however shaky, via well-kept appearances. There’s a reason, after all, why every other twentieth century novel this side of the Atlantic (although Virginia Woolf would probably like a word … Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself, thank you very much) deals so intimately with the well-manicured lawns of suburban homes and the secretly deranged people living within them.
We love to read about beautiful women coming undone, provided they remain beautiful. With her upcoming memoir, Nuzzi is betting on the lasting allure of this most American pastime.1
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Aesthetics aside for a moment, though. Reading the Times profile, one gets the sense Nuzzi sees herself as heiress apparent to Annie Ernaux and Grace Kelly’s particular brands of unhingedness, combining literary and Hollywood royalties in one newly minted California girl. Who said women can’t have it all?
You can hear the drama in her voice (complimentary).
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.
More importantly, the profile is peppered with just enough details to place Nuzzi at the intersection of relatable and unreachable:
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.”
This lore? The crazy, beautiful mother and the working class father? East Coast girlie running away to the West Coast behind the wheel of a convertible, clad in black because She’s Still From New York, Mind You? Oh, she is a pro. I just know Caroline Calloway is taking notes, shaking her head somewhere in Sarasota and wondering why her fall from grace had to stem from a case of measly plagiarism and not a digital affair with a brainwormed Kennedy.
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After reading the Times profile, my fingers, with barely any input from my brain, opened a new tab and typed in vanityfair dot com, and there it was: the American Canto excerpt, right below a photo of Nuzzi, all Clara Bow eyebrows, perfect blonde tresses, and Malibu pastels.
I started scrolling. Which is when I found out that Olivia Nuzzi’s writes like a cross between Rupi Kaur and Chiara Ferragni.2
“I would take a bullet for you,” the Politician said. He always said that. “Please don’t say that,” I said. I always said that.
God, I’m shaking. It’s like reading Rory Gilmore’s final MFA project. Maybe even—I’m sorry about this—Elena Gilbert’s.3
And then there’s this snippet, which the Times also chose to include in its profile:
A politician’s greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one. 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.
I have questions. Like, respectfully: while writing, was Nuzzi consuming a steady diet of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Marcus Aurelius, all while The Tortured Poets Department played on repeat in the background?
Because read this and tell me it’s not Swiftian:4
Like all men but more so, he was a hunter. In a literal sense, he used not a bullet but a bird. It was not about a chase but about a puzzle of logic and skill that amounted to a test of his self-mastery. He was the mouse and the architect of his maze. The giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself.
The overextended metaphors, the forced wordplay, the faux-clever repetition … This is really scary to me because Nuzzi is only two months older than me. I already have a hard time wrestling with my impulse to say in 27 words what I could say in nine. And sure, as far as I’m aware there’s no 71-year-old lurking in my romantic periphery, but you just never know, do you?
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As with many American stories, the running theme of this one is Delusion™. Nuzzi acknowledges it.
I had never been interested in politics, exactly. I was interested in characters, and as it happened there were lots of them in politics, and like all great characters they wanted something, would do whatever they had to in order to get it, and often they were delusional—but often enough to encourage delusion, delusions manifested in America.
Her own unfamiliarity with reality is alluded to more obliquely:
What I felt was that I had been lanced by the teeth of a trap set by a man who could not let me go; that as I tried to free myself, the man for whom I worked had run off with the key to the padlock; that the contradiction in terms, the man I trusted most, the Politician, had walked by the scene whistling, and when he saw me there, a mob on the horizon moving closer, he reached out to me, not to lift me to my feet but to pin me down …
(If you close your eyes, you can kinda see the exact moment where an editor threw up their hands, sighed, and put their red pen aside.)
Are we rooting for her, and with the release of American Canto, is that even what Nuzzi is hoping for? Reading the excerpt’s at times painfully convoluted passages, it’s hard to decide if she is positioning herself as a victim or as a willing, active participant of the whole systemic farce. Maybe she’s both.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. It’ll sell either way. There’s nothing we love more than a messy, public comeback.
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And you know what, let me go ahead and plug “Dead Blondes,” the 2017 season of
’s excellent podcast You Must Remember This.If there’s an editor out there who wants to commission me for a piece on Chiara’s Icarian fall, believe you me: I am ready.
Before you think I’ve taken up residence on a high horse, please know that I am rewatching The Vampire Diaries. Like. At my big age. I watched like three and a half episodes while writing this essay. All to say—I’m not judging, I am observing.
Specifically 2022-2025 … derogatory, sorry!
thank you so much for writing this so I don’t have to read anything else about it! and also the eyebrows callout — I literally startled when I saw them in that second picture. I thought even the youngs learned from that ‘90s mistake?
There is something so American about monetizing one’s most humiliating moment, and - as you perfectly point out - with good hair to boot. I am embarrassed how excited I am to read this book. 🤓📚😭