Olivia Nuzzi tells all on RFK Jr.

​​Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir about her scandalous affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then a presidential candidate and now the country’s leading health bureaucrat, comes out next month. She’s called it American Canto, not to be confused with the bestselling novel Bel Canto, about terrorists who occupy an opera-themed party at a South American mansion. Instead, Nuzzi has trapped us all in the opera of her mind, and there’s no escape. 

​Nuzzi has the apparent ability to turn otherwise rational, educated men into blubbering masses of jelly. In a rather glowing profile over the weekend, accompanied by video of her blonde hair flowing in the wind on the Pacific Coast highway, the New York Times’s Jacob Bernstein said that “Nuzzi disappeared for a year, in self-imposed exile in Los Angeles” after details of the RFK affair came out. “She drives around in a white Mustang convertible, like a Lana Del Rey song come to life.” In reality, she has a job as an editor at Vanity Fair and lives in a house in Malibu. If that’s exile, then Cockburn has been dreaming of exile for decades. 

​In the book, Nuzzi continues to insist that she and RFK Jr. didn’t have sex. “We were not sleeping together,” she said in an interview last year. But they were very much in love, in a pretentiously intimate way that will make a normal person yak. She adored his “particular complications and particular darkness.” According to the times, he called her “Livvy” “and wrote her poems. He said he wanted her to have his baby. He promised to take a bullet for her.”

​Good grief. Nuzzi also writes that both she and RFK “moved through the world with amused detachment and deep sensitivity, contradictions that worked somehow in concert.” You don’t say. Then there was the matter of RFK’s “brain worm,” about which he told her, “baby, don’t worry.” In the book, she writes, “I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein.”

​This sort of love has kept therapists and screenwriters busy for decades. “He was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could,” Nuzzi writes. 

​If that all seems like a bit much, Cockburn really choked on his morning bagel when he read this excerpt, which starts about RFK’s falconry hobby and gradually turns him into a Fabio romance-novel cover hero:

​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. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.

The book may be called American Canto, but a better title might be TMI. Cockburn finds himself wondering why we know all this extremely icky private information at all. She has a job. He has a job. They can both get their names into the papers whenever they want. Our job, apparently, is to read about them and gossip about them. They’re like the lovers at the Coldplay concert, but they wanted to get caught for reasons of professional advancement. Don’t worry, baby. We all have a brain worm now.