Besides not being a revelation, An American Song is neither a book about Trump nor about politics, as Nuzzi claims in the author's note. Rather, “this is a book about life in America as I lived and observed it, and about the nature of our reality and characters,” she explains. “This is also a book about love, because everything is about love and about love for the Motherland.” She directly claims her title: she reports that she has read Dante.
It's hard for the reader to know what to do with Nuzzi in this mode. First, her observations of the country range from the banal (it is violent, divided, both captivated and deluded by images) to the funny (“JonBenét Ramsey said that if you were beautiful, you could get killed serving your country”). Her tone, especially toward Kennedy, is one of insistent sincerity. “I loved his brain,” she writes of the man who was said to have a parasitic brain worm. “I hated the idea of an intruder.” With astonishing grandiosity, she cites last winter's Los Angeles wildfires as a symbol of her professional self-destruction.
Trump may have turned everyone around him into an actor, but Nuzzi always seemed to understand that she was playing a role. “An American Carol” briefly touches on her time as a child actor growing up in New Jersey. September 11, 2001 was one of the days her mother had to pick her up early from school to go “to the studio in SoHo or the theater in Midtown” for an audition. That morning, she recalls: “I dressed more elaborately and colorfully than usual… I thought of it as a normal child's outfit, playing with a child” Later, as a teenager, she attempted to launch a music career under the name Livvy. (Although the book doesn't discuss the episode, Kennedy calls her by that name, as did her father.) Livvy was meant to be a sort of quote-unquote pop star, a “multi-media personality,” according to her MySpace page. A 2010 press release for her first single, “Jailbait,” explained that the song was, according to its creator, “about the role of an underage, hypersexualized girl in society.” “It's about the pornographic ideals that pervade our collective consciousness, this obsession with youth and beauty. I'm not saying any of this is wrong. I am simply stating that this is so.” (“I'll give you enough and you'll want more,” she singsin the chorus.) It's the same spirit of semi-irony, a bit of both, that Nuzzi's critics have seen in her reporting on Trump's Washington – the writer raising an eyebrow just enough to show that she knows better, even as she panders to tasteless appetites.
In “American Song,” Nuzzi characterizes the public end of her relationship with Kennedy as “a story in which I was played against my will.” She objects to being seen as “dressed in leopard.” star reporter“-despite the old red carpet photo that accompanied much of her news coverage,” she writes, “she usually wore all black. I'm hesitant to take Lizza's account of Nuzzi's behavior at face value, but one particular detail stuck with me: He remembers finding a “tabloid-style news article” she wrote in which she described herself as a “blonde beauty” and “one of the best-known political reporters in America.” It's easy to imagine the narrator of “An American Song” creating fan fiction about herself, because on many occasions the book reads as if that's exactly what she was doing. “He threw himself on the bed, unbuttoning his pink shirt, exposing my favorite parts of his chest,” Nuzzi writes of the conversation with Kennedy.
Nuzzi publicly states that she does not want to be the object of media attention: “The fact that I have made myself into what others consider a good copy is horror.” However, she shows some interest in professional stunts. She is generous with explanations of not particularly esoteric terms such as “opposition research” And “looking ahead” When a newspaper reporter asks for comment on the Kennedy rumors, Nuzzi tells her it's “such bullshit” – but only off the record:
