The story of Olivia Nuzzi, Ryan Lizza and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was always going to hit the headlines. It contained too much sex, politics and mystery to be ignored. But there was an extra element that fuelled its appeal: it made journalists feel important again.
British readers might not know what I am talking about. In brief, Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza are American journalists who had a relationship between 2017 and 2024. Nuzzi cheated on Lizza, it has been alleged, with, of all people, former presidential candidate and current Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK, Jr, who she had been interviewing.
Nuzzi made her return last month as West Coast Editor of Vanity Fair, and announced a new memoir American Canto. Deciding that “silence no longer seems advisable or even possible”, Lizza began to publish articles on his Substack which alleged, among other things, that Nuzzi had also had an affair with former presidential candidate Mark Sanford and that she had acted as an informal political operative for Kennedy. Nuzzi, through her lawyer, has condemned a “harassment campaign”.
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That the story is receiving so much attention is unsurprising. It’s pretty damn salacious. But it also makes journalists feel nostalgic for a time — partly imagined but at least partly real — when journalists didn’t just break, or comment on, stories — they were stories. They didn’t just write about famous and charismatic people — they were famous and charismatic people. Now, the average journalist spends a lot less time on the road than on their phones. They spend a lot less time hobnobbing with the rich and powerful than being cyberbullied by anonymous twenty-somethings. Can you imagine Hunter S. Thompson, or Joan Didion, or Christopher Hitchens on Twitter? So, for all of her alleged journalistic transgressions, Nuzzi has at least proved to journalists that journalists can matter.
My takeaway from this squalid business is the shocking state of the prose that it has inspired
This idea, it seems, was at least something of an inspiration for Nuzzi. A Vanity Fair excerpt from American Canto is packed with first person pronouns and moody shots of Ms Nuzzi on the road. “Her concern, as best as I can tell,” writes Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times, “Was and is the cultivation of her own mystique.” Well, there are worse sins in the world. One could almost perversely salute the ambition in an age where most journalists aspire to hot takes. But the sad fact is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a story here. There is no real mystique. Kennedy is such a famous horndog that he makes his boss, Donald Trump, look sexually abstemious.
My takeaway from this squalid business is the shocking state of the prose that it has inspired. Nuzzi’s excerpt from American Canto is unreadable in its portentous pseudo-poetry. “You cannot outrun your life on fire.” “I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain.” “From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible.” Was there no editor courageous enough to ask how a bullet can launch a bullet? “People ask me now about anger,” Nuzzi writes, “About my lack of it. How? How could I not be enraged?” I’m reminded of the old Emo Phillips joke, “People come up to me and ask, ‘Emo, do people really just come up to you?” “I had never been interested in politics, exactly,” claims Nuzzi, “I was interested in characters.” I suspect Goldberg is right that Nuzzi has a primary interest in one character: herself. Writers are lying if they claim to lack self-absorption. But we have to see ourselves as supporting characters in a bigger story — not as the story.
Still, Nuzzi’s writing is not as bad as Lizza’s. Nuzzi’s is delusional but it seems sincere. Lizza’s is the prose of a salesman. Sometimes, he waxes lyrical, musing — with, he might want us to think, a tear in his eye — about the “invasive bamboo” in the garden of the home that he had shared with Nuzzi. “I spent hours hacking at the sprouts to keep the bamboo at bay,” he writes, “Just as I had with all the secrets that Olivia and I shared.” (Thanks, Ryan. There’s absolutely no way I could have figured out such a subtle metaphor for myself.) Soon, though, he is making leering reference to the alleged sexual correspondence between Nuzzi and RFK, Jr. “Thanks to Bobby, I am now aware of something called felching.” Yes, I’m sure a journalist in his late forties was just a sweet summer child.
At one point, Lizza — who doesn’t seem charismatic enough to be a main character in his own story — claims that he was in a “Kafkaesque nightmare”. His politically charged domestic dispute has so little in common with Franz Kafka’s bureaucratic dystopias that if the great writer could hear about the misuse of his work, it would put him through more suffering than tuberculosis. It’s understandable that Lizza wants to get his side of the story out but his prose is such a thin veil for his vindictiveness that it is an insult to words.
Good prose would not be an excuse for sexual immorality or journalistic or political corruption. But without good prose, the journalistic pretense is bogus. Nuzzi’s bewildering clichés expose the hollowness of her pretensions to a kind of gonzo spiritual mystique. Lizza’s clunky metaphors and salacious pandering expose the hollowness of his pretensions to a sort of wounded journalistic principle. Writing a good sentence won’t make you think or live well — but if you can’t write a good sentence, as a journalist, that should preclude much interest in your thoughts or life.
