Politics | Recovery | Current Obsessions
Everyone deserves a good editor.
Olivia,
Thank you so much for this. I’m impressed with the scope of your ambition and everything here has real potential.
General notes on the writing itself (if you want to start tinkering)
Oh boy, those metaphors!
a) I can see why you’ve gravitated to the fire, and LA fire as a real backdrop to a metaphorical flame-out does work. It may work too well, because you’re leaning on it as an abstracted event rather than giving us your lived experience of the fire. Put us next to you. The one line about the windows turning black gives me a taste of what you can do with it. Were you worried about your house or friends or neighbors? Right now, it seems like you weren’t and that says something about you that you may not mean to say.
(The flame/mirror stuff with Trump, I'm afraid, does not work at all.)
b) The gun and bullet stuff. I have more to say about that as a topic a little later. It is genuinely incredible that said he’d take a bullet for you and asked you to take a bullet for him! You need to use that. However (and this goes for most of your metaphors!), you must parse through all these references for continuity with how bullets (or guns or flags or flame) actually work. Or maybe (just a thought) the bullets and guns don’t need to be transformed into explicit metaphors.
“I would take a bullet for you,” the Politician said. He always said that. “Please don’t say that,” I said. I always said that.
Delete everything else in that paragraph. It lands.
c) Flag stuff. Again, think through the physics of flags and how people wield them, which brings us to…
Passive voice/invisible subjects.
This is a thematic issue as well as a grammatical one, but drove me especially crazy in the flag section: Who clutched the flag, who refashioned it? It “mutated” from a “metaphorical to literal weapon,” I assume on 1/6? A particular group “mutated” it! You could describe the actual violence and who perpetrated it.
Whenever possible, name who is doing what to what or whom. That one change in approach will also give you scenes. Anytime something is literal, you have the chance for a scene that will make the metaphor more powerful.
Use scenes more, generally.
Right now, you're in a kind of gauzy memory mode. “I do pay attention to the moon, he once told me.” Oh, okay. That's fantastically weird. When did he tell you that? Where? How did it come up?
Top-level concerns
In this story, we have a real opportunity to talk about the selfishness of elites (including you) as it plays out in the lives of real people. The references to how the fire dramatized structural inequalities are important even if they feel a little distant. Do more of that throughout.
To return to that fire metaphor, Olivia, your personal wildfire had casualties beyond your career and relationship and even personal safety, as important as that is. Did the way you covered these men, both RFK and Trump, fan flames? You write that your job, as you understood it, was to simply bear witness to politics; that you "have never really been interested" in politics, you say, and it shows. You say your fascination with characters is what drove you. This, too, shows.
But looking at the mess that we're in today, the one you dramatize with flags and talk of a warped reality, is it possible that your disinclination to think about the impact of these characters on the American people (rather than an admittedly crazy-making media landscape) is a part of our national tragedy?
More to the point: Did your silence about the affair help RFK escape consequences and thus secure an appointment at HHS? If you came forward and came completely clean, with genuine regret and acknowledgement of harm done, that would have been the real sacrifice. Could that have been you “taking a bullet” for the greater good and not his career? Maybe not, but it's something I would force myself to think about if I were you. (You might be pilloried for even musing about having such an outsized influence, I know. Still, taking responsibility for one's actions, or non-actions, makes a memoir stronger.)
I might also think about what caused me to romanticize a man with such a body count in his wake. Falling rates of vaccination (egged on by RFK for years, now institutionalized by his changes in policy at the CDC) are killing people. I’ve seen modeling that shows a five percent decline in measles uptake among children means a three-fold increase in cases; low uptake in flu vaccines has led to record numbers of deaths due to flu. Then there’s the autism bullshit, which is pure eugenics.
Why was he appealing to you? Why did you pursue him? Why did you stay involved though it involved crossing such dramatic ethical boundaries? Those of us raised by alcoholics (and thank you for being honest and vulnerable about that) keep trying to get the thing we didn't have at home from the same kind of people we had at home. It never works.
I’ve come to terms with how much of what I thought was love was really a compulsive search for the approval and stability I didn’t feel capable of creating for myself. Many of us raised by alcoholics know that pattern intimately. Check out the Adult Children of Alcoholics if you want a guide to that sort of excavation.
Maybe you're already doing the work I'm talking about in therapy. But from personal experience here again, that kind of therapeutic processing gives invisible scaffolding to the writing itself. And I'm not seeing that here.
You may have set your life on fire but you were not seriously burned.
We're looking forward to publishing this book, but I think we're all aware of how many journalists' books we do not publish. We can point to your talent as what makes you the exception, but no one is fooling themselves to think it's just that.
Olivia, your fame is part of this swirl of destruction that you want to document. I am not judging you personally; your fame and the way you've been able to recover your career are themselves symptoms of our national distress. Your apparent blindness to your place in things is going to make others doubt your insight as a political observer. (Right now, to be honest, you're covering yourself the way the old you would have covered you: as a character first, without much regard to what your character flaws have wrought.)
Lastly: I'm worried about you.
If you still own the gun you wrote about, I beg that you sell it or give it to a trusted friend for self-keeping. That whole section, this whole piece, is larded with references to self-annihilation (drowning, disappearing, melting).
I know about those thoughts. (Common to us adult children of alcoholics.) They can be, if you will, a sort of brainworm. I worry that the unprocessed prose here is feeding that curl of self-pity and hopelessness rather than excising it.
You're clearly patterning off Didion, one of my faves, and I say aim high. But the key to her brilliance is compression, elegance: each word a tiny gift, carefully chosen, and most of all, she never indulges.
There are passages where you describe dynamics genuinely harmful to you. Kennedy appears to be incredibly manipulative and, as he admits, a pathological liar. You may have approached him, but the power dynamic was not equal. And the vitriol that came your way when all this broke — the harassment, the sadism from commentators, the way misogyny attaches itself to any woman’s misstep. None of that was deserved. But there’s also a persistent passivity.
Life is never cleanly sorted into victims and villains. You can be both. People and events wounded you, and you’ve written around that pain in metaphor, circling it rather than naming it or taking us through it. Give us the scenes. Give us the exact words. Show us what happened rather than relying on the feeling-memory alone. Don’t aim for readers to sympathize with you; tell them in detail (Quotes! Actions! Sensations!) what you went through, and trust that it was bad enough (it was) that you don’t need to persuade them. Maybe they'll sympathize. Maybe they won't. They will respect you for the clarity.
There’s one moment in the excerpt where the lyricism falls away—when you move from the symbolic to the literal and describe your numbness in the body (“my chest, my spine, behind my belly button”), and then reveal the presence of the gun. It is the most unadorned, direct piece of writing in the whole chapter: no myth, no monster-language, no fire, no national allegory. No metaphor. Just the fact of the gun, and the fact of your blankness. That’s the level of clarity the rest of the book needs. Not more pain, not more confession—just the courage to stay literal when the stakes are highest. That’s where the truth is.
It’s also what scared me the most. If the book moves toward that register, I want to make sure it does so looking backward. The danger is in leaving that door open rather than closing it with self-understanding.
If you put this out as it is, there will be howls. I know you think you're prepared for that. You are not.
You cannot preemptively address every criticism, but what you can do in advance is expose the work to as many critical readers as possible, whether you take their advice or not. I'll be honest, it might be difficult to find a sensitivity reader for this one. We should still try. Are there any Black female journalists you admire?
You need to be confident you've done the best work possible; that's the only defense that will keep the outrage from crushing you.
I need to deliver a hard truth or you will be even more exposed.
You’ve written a book about consequences without yet looking directly at your own. This avoidance makes the literary filigree more than decoration, it makes your excesses a kind of lie.
Cut until only the true things remain. That’s where the book starts.
Let's have lunch when you're in town.
Best,
A.
If this sort of close reading, structural triage, and tough-love clarity speaks to you, this is the part where I remind you that I run a memoir workshop. It’s a place for getting honest on the page, sharpening what’s already there, and knowing when to stop hiding behind metaphor.
If you want updates, early enrollment alerts, or just more of these occasional dispatches, you can sign up for the newsletter. It’s the easiest way to find your way in.
Or you can just upgrade to paid and I can do more of this kind of silliness instead of writing columns!