My copy of American Canto arrived today. The presale edition I placed weeks ago not realizing I would be gifted an early copy. Familiar already, as I have read and seen it through evolving variations in random excerpts as they shaped over the past year. When I pulled it out of the package I was shocked to see it in badly damaged form. Its spine severely dented. The center, bent like a rooftop. The cover shredded into fanned fringes on the corners. It looked injured. War torn even. Comically so. A nod to its wildly volatile release. Her first book written amid her year in exile. Disgraced in better weather after the scandal knocked her off her course (you all remember how it went down). Malibu, as literary lore goes, is always a good place to write. Also, a good place to start anew. Which is what she did.
In American Canto, she writes about the politician. We know him well. In part two, we address that dynamic, him as shared subject. She also writes extensively about the country from the perspective of a twenty something journalist armed with an irreverent candor and a front seat to Trump’s meteoric rise, interjected with philosophy quotes, rock lyrics, poems, and transcripts, arranged like a collage layered by lyrical expression, America framed by poetic patchwork.
I like the book. Not because of obvious bias, but because it is a rare and unique genre. Reflections about politics told from the perspective of a woman her age, with the access she managed, and the curiosity that drives it. If anything, one can sense a pure and ferocious desire to know and see and write it all. This is what bonded and then rebounded us. I know tabloid fodder carved a suspicious angle, pinning us as cunning characters up to sinister things. But the reality is, strange fate forced strange union on us.
This past year has been a strange one for me, as well. After being burned by some of the people closest to me, slandered by people—some with big platforms and big influence, plus venom in their veins—I was left humiliated and spiritually bruised. Not to mention confused, conflicted, and alone. It is hard to make sense of aimless pursuit once your confidence has been leveled publicly. The only person who could relate was Olivia. She was helpful in lending advice and being excited about my ideas and my interests when no one else was. There was no competition. And no desire to refine reckless edges of our character. Even when we recognized in the other, some form of risk in raw form.
Part one of the conversation covers her backstory, growing up a child actor, learning to navigate the moods of a complicated mother who, like my father, suffered from addiction, how she got into political coverage as a teenager, how our feud morphed into a friendship, followed by another feud, and then back to complicated friendship, which I don’t expect all readers to understand. But do think, when all is said and done, it makes for a good story. And I can say with full confidence, that is something we both appreciate equally and unapologetically, above all else.
Much of what we discuss, and much of what she writes about, as you will hear, is the subject of distortion.
In part two, we address this new season of chaos that has distorted perceptions of American Canto before anyone had a chance to read it and led, just today, to a joint announcement from Olivia and Vanity Fair that her contract as West Coast Editor would expire in the new year without renewal. About that, she told me, “I love Vanity Fair and this decision was made out of respect for the staff and faith in the future of the publication.“
The chaos was wrought by a scorned man she barely mentions in the book—and maybe that’s the problem. The few times she does, she calls him “the man I did not marry,” and engages in none of the character assassination that made him go viral on this platform in anticipation of its release. She never tells us in any detail why she “needed to leave,” for instance, but provides restrained clues—“I was used to his efforts to control me”—as she describes “what increasingly appeared to be a mad plot to harm me” that included invasions of privacy and threats to the Politician, who asked her to “deescalate” the situation to prevent the man she did not marry from igniting a scandal. “I tried. I failed,” she writes. The scandal reignited now is harder for her to accept. “Last year, I understood. I fucked up and it was my fault, ultimately, that I had assumed the risk in the first place, so I could not fault anyone else over how my life fell apart or judge the pleasure anyone took in watching it happen,” she told me. “This is different.”
A preview of our part two, in which we discuss the actions of the man she did not marry:
“It’s nuance VS. the narrative spun by someone I could best describe as a Peeping Tom who thinks that whatever he observed through the keyhole, or heard pressing his ear against the door, or extracted from the object of his obsession when he leapt out from the dark to frighten her, is enough to form an authoritative narrative about what happened inside a room he never entered. But because his version of reality conforms to partisan biases and offers catharsis, the very people who would have you believe that they ‘believe women’ will defer to an abusive man before they give a woman perceived to have intolerably nonconformist political views a chance to speak. There is safety in choosing a side, and I understand why that appeals, but the cost seems too high to me. The stories I tell in American Canto are not conservative or liberal; they’re human.”
You can—and should—buy the book to form your own opinion:
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