Here are the most scathing lines from the reviews of Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto.

There’s nothing brave or noble about admitting that I am completely engrossed by the ongoing Olivia Nuzzi saga. It’s not just that it’s tawdry, or that all the players are, to varying degrees, despicable. It’s also the Wider Implications, for journalism, and for the current political reality (though I would argue that neither of them needed any help from Olivia Nuzzi on the Looking Dire front). But, to quote Becca Rothfeld’s review of Nuzzi’s newly released American Canto, “You shouldn’t write a memoir unless you are willing to make yourself look foolish and pathetic.” (This isn’t a memoir, it’s a blog post, but I think the point stands.) My prurient, gossip-hungry interest in all the details of the thing both foolish and pathetic. What can I say—I’m waiting for a few holds to come through on Libby and I need the excitement.

I do, however, draw the line at reading the book itself, mostly because the reviews (all pans at current accounting) point out that it’s almost entirely juiceless. But since I appreciate a good pan almost as much as I love an extremely messy scandal in which no one is remotely innocent, I’ve collected some of the most scathing lines from the critics’ takes on American Canto.

I hesitate to take at face value Lizza’s account of Nuzzi’s behavior, but a specific detail sticks in my mind: he recounts finding a “tabloid-style news story” she wrote in which she describes herself as a “blonde beauty” and “one of the most famous political reporters in America.” It is easy to imagine the narrator of “American Canto” producing fan fiction about herself, because, in many cases, the book reads as if that’s what she’s doing. “He threw himself onto the bed, his pink shirt unbuttoned, revealing my favorite parts of his chest,” Nuzzi writes, of a conversation with Kennedy. –Molly Fisher (The New Yorker)

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On Page 15 of this 303-page bafflement we get to the astrology (“a Gemini nation, under a Gemini ruler”). At the book’s midpoint, we learn the author and Kennedy were born under the same kind of January Capricorn gobbledygook. “Do you think this means we’re compatible?” the man the author calls the Politician in these pages, who IRL oversees the health care of more than 300 million Americans, asked her. –Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)

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[A]t its worst, Nuzzi’s prose is not just stilted or repetitive. It is ostentatiously mannered, itching at every turn to announce its showy lyricism[…]

You shouldn’t write a memoir unless you are willing to make yourself look foolish and pathetic. Nuzzi breaks this cardinal rule, flattering herself by admitting to only the chicest kinds of disintegration. She tells us that she didn’t eat or sleep, that she grew remote and aloof, that she lit a lot of candles, drove around California in a Mustang convertible and had very glamorous breakdowns while gazing wistfully at the sky. She is wholly unwilling to expose the heart of her attraction to an object as unlikely as RFK Jr.  –Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)

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Nuzzi is too old to be absolved from these moral, political, and journalistic sins. –Joan Walsh (The Nation)

I know I ought to be ashamed…