Publishers Weekly
10/23/2023
Actor and model Fox debuts with an unvarnished account of her tumultuous childhood, struggles with drug use, complicated friendships, and volatile romances. Beginning with her move, at age six, from Italy to New York City—where she and her family had been homeless for a brief period when Fox was a toddler—Fox chronicles her rise, fall, and resurgence in Manhattan’s downtown milieu. Along the way, she recounts relationships with a series of violent men and the scars she weathered from a procession of best friends with whom she fell out. Key episodes include a torrid affair with a young drug dealer from the Bronx, a hot-and-cold romance with a softhearted sugar daddy, a cleansing stint in Louisiana, and the birth of Fox’s son in 2021. Throughout, Fox discusses heavy subject matter, including her early experiences with heroin and her teenage stint as a dominatrix, in blunt terms (“As I stand there, completely naked with my legs apart and wrists tied up and hooked to the ceiling, I can’t escape my reflection. I can see myself from every angle... Then the most forbidden thought of all crosses my mind: What if my parents saw me like this? Cringe”), which works both to the book’s advantage and to its detriment: it lends the proceedings an air of intimacy, but prevents Fox from varying her emotional register. Her present-tense narration can feel like a shortcut to immediacy, though it’s an effective one. Less effective is her reliance on clichés (“My hero turned out to be nothing more than just another flawed human being”). Though Fox’s recollections feel somewhat undigested, their gossipy appeal is difficult to deny. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
"Fox makes a case for herself as one of her generation’s most authentic storytellers...The memoir is a practice in radical transparency. While other high-profile memoir writers might carefully construct their narratives in the service of maintaining a calculated public image, Fox takes an unflinching look back at both the exhilarating and painful moments of her life, one that she has chronicled as only she can.” —Cady Lang, TIME
“Searing...We tend to see survivors in one of two ways: the ‘good survivor,’ a strong woman who identifies herself by her trauma and internalizes shame, or the ‘bad survivor,’ a talented and unrepentant train wreck who shamelessly acts out. But Fox, through her memoir and public persona, presents a third option. She dares to be honest without yielding to the tremendous pressure to confess to the abuse she has endured from a vantage point of crystalline respectability....In her book, Fox refuses to play the good survivor’s game of switching off entire parts of herself, like the parts that might still be attracted to an abusive ex or that crave a drug to relieve pain. She makes no apologies nor does she make a song and dance of what she was thinking. She is not your survivor.” —Elizabeth Nicholas, New York magazine's The Cut
“A car crash of a memoir of addiction, abuse and sex...Every new anecdote brings a fresh opportunity for disaster: Which character will be arrested or die or nearly die by the end of this chapter? Messy, tense, and sometimes tragic...also darkly funny.” —Jessica Testa, The New York Times
“With her new memoir, Fox has become a writer, telling her story with a kind of dissociated, deadpan sweetness born of having experienced several lifetimes’ worth of adventure and disaster by the age of thirty-three...It adds up to a story of a woman who’s damaged and tender, protective and unpredictable, a self-identified freak.”
—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
“Fox’s debut memoir spares no one, least of all herself, in its shocking tales...[An] amalgamation of soap opera, Mafia flick and A Star Is Born topped with a heaping of heroin.”
—Ilana Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
"This isn't the type of celebrity memoir filled with frivolous name-drops and flimsy anecdotes; it's a revealing and often harrowing journey through the life of a person who has been reviled, adored and victimizedand also just happens to be recognizable. In many cases, such as when she recalls her father's physical and emotional abuse, she turns what she endured into a teachable lesson, clearly stating what she learned from the pain."
—Sonia Rao, The Washington Post
"Harrowing, achingly sad at times, and a narcotics-soaked shock to the system. It's also impossible to put down."
—Helen Holmes, The Daily Beast
"Julia Fox's masterpiece was everything I hoped it would be...Every single chapter had me on the edge of my seat."
—Juliana Ukiomogbe, ELLE ("Best Books of 2023")
"You think you've read it all, and then there's Julia Fox, whose debut memoir proved that reading can be a physical activity—one of us lost our breath about 100 pages in...It takes an incredible life to make a whirlwind relationship to Ye, formerly Kanye West, the least interesting thing about you, but Fox is an incredible person."
—Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton, hosts of the Celebrity Memoir Book Club podcast ("Washington Post Best Celebrity Memoirs of 2023")
“Fox’s powerful instinct to survive and to harness her own narrative are all over this well-crafted, exciting, shocking, heartfelt, and altogether unputdownable memoir...Fox started the buzz herself, calling her memoir-in-process ‘a masterpiece’ last year. Her star is rising, and fans will find that buzz utterly deserved.”
—Annie Bostrom, Booklist
praise for the author New York magazine
One of the all-time pop-culture greats.”
Kirkus Reviews
2023-10-10
A memoir from the Italian American actor and model.
Though she lived in Milan until she was 6, Fox (b. 1990) spent her coming-of-age years in Manhattan with her frazzled, indifferent father; for a brief period, they were homeless. The author haphazardly packs the details of her childhood into an opening chapter clouded with scandal and betrayal involving her father and her best friend’s single mother. Fox chronicles how the horrific events of 9/11 traumatized and prematurely ushered her “into adulthood before puberty.” She matured mostly on her own, since her mother had “no interest in performing any maternal acts.” During her adolescence, Fox moved between New York and Italy, experimenting with shoplifting, sex, and drugs. She also experienced a psychiatric breakdown, and a host of unreliable friends and lovers led her astray. Fox worked for a few months as a dominatrix named Valentina, though she soon tired of the “mental gymnastics” of the BDSM scene, and hard-partying adventures with several addict friends ended in tragedy. In 2019, Fox appeared in the hit movie Uncut Gems, alongside Adam Sandler, and her debut performance became a sensation. From there, she focused on sobriety and mothering her newborn son, Valentino, as well as keeping a custody battle at bay. Only in the closing chapters does Fox divulge her brief and “uncomfortable” 2022 romance with “the artist” (a thinly veiled Kanye West), which unceremoniously shifted her into the public eye. She also writes vividly about her search for the drug dealer she feels is responsible for the death of her friend. The epiphany in the final pages doesn’t quite mesh with the rest of the memoir, which, while breathless and exhilarating, reads more like a druggy, often rushed novel that could have used tighter editing.
A chatty, meandering, splashy self-portrait that may appeal to fans.