About a third of the way into her new memoir, American Canto, Olivia Nuzzi airs her grievances with DC. The things she loathes about the city include the weather (“unbearable”), the vibe (“people in Washington love to identify as productive”), the size (“you cannot look both ways to cross the street without seeing someone you wish to not know”), the sheer volume of other political reporters (“as if what repulses me about them is not what I see of myself in them”), and the need to repeatedly endure the “buzzless start to a dinner party or a book event or a strange gala at the residence of the ambassador to I-never-know-what.”
To Nuzzi, DC is a “place where you cannot live, really,” where stepping outside for some air means encountering John Kerry or Newt Gingrich and realizing that “those two are not even close to the worst people whose lives are devoted in one way or another to ensuring that they never have to leave Washington,” the kinds of people that “can always get a table from Franco at Cafe Milano”—an establishment that she alleges, without evidence, is staffed by spies. (“Why is there a Cafe Milano in the UAE and nowhere else?”)
In particular, Nuzzi deplores the “standard greeting” at Washington events: “nice to see you” (never “nice to meet you”), a way to ensure that you’re not caught rudely introducing yourself to someone you’ve already met. She calls this a “coward’s salutation, an attempt to avoid embarrassment, deny fallibility, present oneself as connected and knowledgeable.” And while Nuzzi admits that she herself now uses “nice to see you,” too, she “cannot say it without wishing to be struck down in that moment by a merciful God.” Later, she adds that her acceptance of this phrase is one example of how she became “willing to accept ugliness for utility, which is one definition of Washington.”
With the exception of Sally Quinn—whom Nuzzi seems to adore and describes as “still beautiful and hot, palpably and electrically sexual in her eighties, which I love”—Nuzzi finds the city’s social life dreadful. She quotes a friend disparaging the “hideousness of the Washington perma-class,” and describes events full of “the Regulars, the people who will never leave Washington” all of whom are in “some sort of debt, social or otherwise, to a very wealthy person.” At one party for a Democratic megadonor, Nuzzi says, she had an exchange with a cabinet secretary and his wife in which the wife said, sweetly, that the secret to a good marriage is finding time every day to connect. Later, while alone with Nuzzi, the secretary apparently clarified that the secret to marriage is that everyone cheats. To Nuzzi, DC is the kind of place that turns ambition into monstrosity, though she’s at least alert enough to implicate herself.
But honestly, there are moments where Nuzzi makes DC sound pretty fun. She describes, for example, a dinner party at the home of “the executive” whose actress girlfriend “waltzed along the terrace holding a cicada in one hand and a vape in the other” as a Secret Service officer lurked outside the front door, protecting President Obama’s nearby home. Later in the night, Nuzzi claims, she was in the kitchen when the actress grabbed her face and said, “Olivia, the secret to life is to be rapeable. You are rapeable.” She writes that the actress also advised her not to smoke the filter of a cigarette. Nuzzi calls this woman a “shock of honesty in this weird little town.”
Perhaps Nuzzi likes her new home in Los Angeles better. A recent New York Times profile did describe a fairly glam existence, with Nuzzi living in “a tiny house in the heart of Malibu where lizards crawl into her kitchen” and tooling around the canyons in a white Mustang convertible, “like a Lana Del Rey song come to life.” But despite her disdain, I suspect that she’d rather still be here—in a scrum of reporters in the Rose Garden or texting with the president’s squabbling aides. In American Canto, Nuzzi writes of being in California and watching, from afar, as odd and consequential events unfolded back east. In one such moment, she felt “a pang of regret that I could not go out there to report.”
UPDATE: On Tuesday afternoon, while answering reader questions on the Substack “Feed Me,” Nuzzi made several additional comments about DC. Notably, she made the controversial allegation that Burn After Reading is the best film about Washington ever made, then declared that “If I was elected president in a write-in campaign I would not return to Washington.”
Correction: A previous version of this post misstated who it was that Nuzzi alleges grabbed her face at a party and told her she was “rapeable.”
