“Forget the sex; the real scandal here is the crime against language.” — Brian Phillips, The Ringer, on Olivia Nuzzi’s new memoir, American Canto, about her affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“I desired. He desired me desiring. He desired to desire my desiring. It was turtles all the way down, except the turtles were boners.”
“Our union represented the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and the eternal, unending nature of time. Sometimes I didn’t know where the worm ended, and our love began.”
“’I want to break both of us down into tiny particles and blend them together like so many mice to be fed to your falcon,’ I told him. Some men, lesser men, men who failed to engage with desire to the very hilt of their cocks—those men would have found these sentiments extreme. But with the Politician, they barely scratched the surface of his erotic carapace.”
“I load a gun. The bullet farcical becomes the bullet strategic. A hammer, pulled back. A spark, a flare, a warning. A brush fire. In my pants. I load a gun.”
“’Will you write about me? Will you write about us? Our souls’ connection? About how we found each other on this crazy planet of billions of people?’ he garbles. ‘Yes,’ I purr in response. ‘On my Notes app somewhere in Runyon Canyon, assuming my battery doesn’t die.’”
“I became both heroine and heroin to him. And sometimes, a heron, for when we did bird play.”
“While he watched over FaceTime, I slowly poured liquid Tylenol all over my naked body. I loved him enough to make myself autistic. He wept.”
“In time, I came to see why he hated the vaccine. It represented the death of wildness. Of nature. It would have dispelled his brain fog, the very crucible out of which his genius was forged.”
“You cannot outrun your life on fire. One that you set yourself by playing with matches near a propane tank while wearing flammable lingerie.”
“The worm eating the Politician’s brain filled my heart with a viscous envy. The worm was privy to his secrets. To his raw, animal nature. It got to curl up inside his brain folds and throb with him as he tried to form thoughts. I wanted to make my home in his oversized Irish cranium. I wanted to dominate a news cycle. All the news cycles.”
“What is a politician? What is felching? I googled, read, heaved. Then we felched twice.”
“Repetition. Repetition is poetry. Poetry is soul. Myself, no empty vessel. No blank canvas. No unloved daughter. Repetition. I load another gun.”
“We didn’t touch; we didn’t need to. We also didn’t need to look at each other. Or speak. He may not have known I existed. Existence is a fire. The fire is a mirror. What is America?”
“Did we fuck in a bear corpse? Yes, metaphorically. But also literally.”
“The Journalist grew bamboo. In time, it overtook his terrace. No one wanted to go in his backyard anymore. ‘You gave me the clap,’ he said. I loaded a gun. He wrote a Substack.”