The journalist who tanked her career for RFK Jr.

Olivia Nuzzi's new book, 'American Canto,' tries to place her alleged affair in the context of the Trump era's weirdness

- ROBIN ABCARIAN

SELF-DESTRUCTIVE behavior can be fun to read about when the principals are good-looking, famous or powerful.

In the downfall and attempted resurrection of the journalist Olivia Nuzzi, we have a trifecta of prurience: A beautiful young political reporter who is engaged to a much older professionally successful colleague falls in love with her subject, a much older, married presidential candidate from a storied American family.

With her fiance in the dark, a year of passionate phone sex and bad poetry reportedly ensues. But the beautiful young reporter is also something of a blabbermouth and word gets out. A famous tech journalist, once Nuzzi’s mentor, reveals her transgressions to her fiance and her employer. Nuzzi’s engagement ends, the lover dumps her, she is fired from her job and—she flees to the West Coast because, you know, this is the place Easterners come to so they can take stock and seek redemption. You can’t get any farther from New York than Point Mugu. “Here,” as Joan Didion once famously wrote, “is where we run out of continent.”

Nuzzi’s new book, “American Canto,” is a disjointed mashup, part obscurantist memoir and part reflection on the weirdness of the era of Donald Trump, whom she’s covered for years and who always seems happy to see her no matter what she writes about him. “Very young and very beautiful,” he says the first time they meet.

Nuzzi has the unfortunate habit of trying to channel Didion, California’s high priestess of angst. Huge mistake. Anyone who tries to imitate the singular Didion just comes off cringey: “This I will tell you,” Nuzzi writes. “Events lost context. Words lost meaning.”