Sentences From American Canto That Sent Me To The Hospital

I reviewed Olivia Nuzzi’s new book, American Canto, for Slate today. Here are some sentences from her memoir that sent me to the hospital:

1. The flag winked beside lanes that bent to borders that faded to barriers that fell to the lines I crossed. I am talking, of course, about how it happened between me and the Politician. (page 17)
   

2. I wonder if I would recoil from people who grab hold of me if I did not feel that I had been grabbed by the hands of the country. I wonder if I would recoil from women who drink several martinis were it not for my mother. (page 18)
   

3. It is easy to mistake force or scale or scope for power when what it really is is grace, by which I mean restraint. (page 19)
   

4. [Trump’s] hand was so soft that it felt almost wet. My father had just died. I thought of his hands. Rough, dry. In winter, the skin on his knuckles cracked and bled. He worked, every day; he worked, through the night; with his hands, he worked. Trump looked me up and down. “Very young and very beautiful,” he said. (page 33)
   

5. For instance, she tried to pit me against a television reporter who is one of my closest friends, tried to make me jealous about some sort of news exclusive, and when I realized what she was endeavoring to do I laughed and I said, Oh. You have to try something else, because I do not care about news and am not competitive by nature. (page 40)

6. I was once gifted a drone. I named him Pistachio, since he was so tiny. (page 44)

7. Males intrude by their nature. It is not their fault entirely. (page 50)
   

8. The movie star, not a fraud at all, in fact a shock of honesty in this weird little town, approached and grabbed my face. “Olivia, the secret to life is to be rapeable,” she told me. “You are rapeable.” (page 102)

9. He said he had been warned about her by the South African tech billionaire with whom she had reportedly had a drug-fueled sexual encounter while she was married to a different tech billionaire, but by the time he received the call that informed him she was “crazy,” it was too late. (page 120)

10. I never feared bosses because I never had cause to fear them. I was often late on deadline and I filed provocative expense reports, but no one complained. (page 125)

11. What I wanted was to mother him even as mothering him would keep me from ever knowing the man forged from that boy’s pain. (page 148)

12. I love him, I thought. Oh no. I love him so much. (page 148)

13. Like all men but more so, he was a hunter. In a literal sense, he used not a bullet but a bird. (page 153)

14. “A friend told me the man I did not marry had reached out. “He said, ‘If she wants to come back, I would still take her back.’ It was like Cape Fear.” (page 162)

15. “Fist. Flag. Flame.” (page 198)

16. “Good times ghost. Bad times crash. I look down at the crashing swell. Alone at the after-party, a kind of honeymoon in hell. I am on the list, a bit of grave misfortune. I am in the New York Post, even worse. The ink is black, the pages yellow. Everything, some kind of lie. What of doubt? Scientists cannot see the soul.” (page 249)
    

17. “There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.” — Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, referring in the specific to the reflection of sunlight through the plastic facets of an Evian bottle (page 262)
    

18. The more visible I was at any given time, the more that became an intrusion, because you cannot be a fly on the wall when people would like a picture with the fly, and when the sweet older woman has a grandson in medical school who Just has the biggest crush on the fly and Actually, if the fly does not mind she is Going to call Michael right now, this will just make his day, and while it rings, while she Has the fly here, she will wonder, How do you stand it, talking to the awful president? and, What is his attorney like? He seems drunk, is he drunk? and the media personalities whose television programs the fly appears on, Are they as wonderful as they seem? and—Oh Michael! Honey, look! The fly! (page 297)

Here’s my review. We have some new Scamfluencers episodes for you, namely this Howard Hughes biography hoax that’ll speak to you if you have literary scams on the brain, for whatever reason.