Reviewers: Awaited 'Tell-All' Fails to Tell All

Journalist Olivia Nuzzi's book is out on Tuesday, and if the name isn't familiar it might mean you haven't followed the media world's biggest soap opera of the year. Nuzzi famously lost her job as Washington correspondent for New York magazine when her unusually close relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to light. She chronicles all that in American Canto, while former fiance and fellow journalist Ryan Lizza has been telling his side of the story in serialized fashion online. As for the book, reviews have not been glowing:

• "American Canto was written too early, and too quickly," writes Helen Lewis at the Atlantic. "It is a first draft, hastily typed into a smartphone; a bargaining chip to gain favorable news coverage; a down payment on a post-scandal career. A tell-all memoir? Ha. This is a tell-nothing memoir. Instead, it is a portrait of losing your soul—of discovering, as Nuzzi quotes from Nietzsche, that when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."
• At the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg finds that all of the above feels more like "performance art" on the part of Nuzzi and Lizza. The latter has "alleged outrageous violations of journalistic ethics by his ex," she writes. "Perhaps the most serious is his claim that Nuzzi used her reporting skills to unearth potential negative stories about Kennedy so that he could quash or pre-empt them." Nuzzi's book "suggests these charges are at least partly true, making the whole episode a serious journalistic scandal hiding inside a frivolous sexual one."
• Readers who want the nitty-gritty on her relationship with Kennedy—referred to as "the Politician" in the book—will likely be disappointed, writes Sophia Nguyen at the Washington Post. "The specifics of their relationship—how and when it began, for example—generally remain hazy, though she describes the poetry they exchanged and how they bonded over his attempts to befriend a pair of ravens. She says that he often showed her photographs of himself as a young man and that he said he wanted her to have his baby."