The Must-Read Julia Fox Memoir
Wednesday is about books. And writing. Today, a review of an explosive new celeb-memoir. A must-read I reckon...
I’ve just finished reading Down The Drain, a hotly anticipated memoir by the actor, model muse, nouveau-celebrity and survivor, Julia Fox.
The first I’d ever heard of Julia Fox was when I saw Uncut Gems. Her star-turn in that movie is undeniable, and all the more impressive because she’s a non-name, at least as far as acting goes. I’d never seen her before, but couldn’t take my eyes off her – she’s scene-stealing. And Uncut Gems (as I wrote here) is a genius-level film; easily one of my favourites of the 21st Century.
Fox plays Adam Sandler’s character’s mistress.
I was gobsmacked when I saw this interview clip shortly after.
It isn’t that Fox is wearing a dress that features a hand choking her. It isn’t that she appears rather spaced-out, detached and way too cool for school. It’s that she describes her next project as a book she’s still writing that is “so far, a masterpiece” and that it“was like a memoir at first, but now it’s just like my first book, you know”.
I wanted to read that book!
And so now I have.
And in between seeing the film, and that interview clip – and now reading the book – I had learned that she was some sort of “New York-famous” fashion icon, she’d dated Kanye West for a minute, and therefore of course been his muse, and she had survived a fair amount of trauma, and worked as a dominatrix.
This all told me the memoir would be, well, interesting to say the very least. I was in.
Down The Drain does not disappoint.
It's a harrowing tale, and I can’t tell if Fox is pleased with herself for surviving, or just pleased that it is leverageable. But that’s boring, safe, white, privileged, Gen-X me applying my lens of mild cynicism.
It's almost cringe-making at times (to me) how free and easy she is with her honesty. And with what feels like a profound lack of accountability. In an era where we are bored to tears with people who suddenly became famous for being famous, it would be too easy to write Fox off as some trust-funded mess-by-design. It’s also not the case of course.
Her story is one of trauma-survivor. She hurls us into her bizarre world of growing up between Italy and America with parents that war, and can’t (be bothered to) parent. She takes us straight to her love of drugs and sex, both coping mechanisms that quickly turn to hobbies, lifestyle-definers, and danger-driven nooses. All of them all the time. Everything all at once.
Fox is 11 when she is passionately kissed by a guy in her late 20s. She loses her virginity at 14 to a guy who is 26. She is hooked on weed in her early teens, and it is her gateway to angel dust and coke and heroin and almost anything else, and all while she is still at school, becoming some Mean Girls-styled cool kid from a different club. Detached, absent, just like the poor example from her parents.
It's somehow invigorating to read about, harrowing as all hell but page-turningly ‘good’. And yet, there feels like there’s a) no responsibility being shown and b) it seems judge-y in the absurd extreme to expect any responsibility being shown.
I started to read this in the way some people watch horror films. A cracks-of-the-fingers read. You cannot look away, but it is horrific.
Boyfriends are drug dealers and pimp-y. They bash her head against walls. They dangle her from hotel windows. She attempts suicide as an escape. She offers no trigger warnings, and nothing but frankness in her descriptions of the drug-taking, the stalking, the violence, and the sex. All of those components are often combined to make a good night, that quickly turns bad.
When she’s put on probation and told she must get a job she answers a dominatrix ad in the paper and becomes ‘Valentina’. She meets a high-end client on a house call, and he becomes her sugar-daddy. Buying her cars and a place to live. It’s her next movie, for sure. You couldn’t make this up, right?
People have loved Fox’s ‘weird’ interviews, and her kooky fashion looks. They have written her off as a flake, a drug-fucked attention seeker, a parasitic whore.
Or they have decided she is their spirit-animal. Maybe both.
Down The Drain has a high body-count, in both the parlance of today (sex) and its more literal meaning.
And on nearly every page we start to recognise that we’re lucky to be reading these words from Fox. That she’s lucky to be alive to share them. And yet, still, her version of honesty comes with some glaze of nonchalance.
We finally get to UncutGems, one of the film’s makers (The Safdie Brothers) was obsessed with her, and used her real life as inspiration for the character – even naming the character Julia. The studio doesn’t want her because she’s not a name-actor. They want Jennifer Lawrence, or someone like that.
But it’s one of the least interesting stories in the book. There’s some nice writing throughout, and one of the cool bits of foreshadowing is a teenaged Fox, high and bored and in one of her many toxic relationships, Netflix’n’chilling on some “Adam Sandler movies” earlier in the book. So, we know what’s, erm, coming…
The final chapter is her ‘relationship’ (a month or two at best) of dating Kanye West/Ye. Though she calls him “The Artist” only. We know who it is – and if somehow, we didn’t, she references his ex, Kim Kardashian, to give us more than a clue.
These two things – Kanye and Uncut Gems – are the least two interesting stories in a book that is a rollercoaster of bad-times.
So where is the redemption? Well, Fox is a mother (kinda funny/kinda sad that she has named her child Valentino – given her dominatrix name was so similar). She is also still here. She is also one hell of a storyteller, with – of course – the stories to sell. The stories from a near-literal hell.
I got to the end of the book and still thought that the narrator wasn’t so much unreliable, as unrelatable. But why would you ever want to relate to this? Just be pulled along. Just be grateful it’s not you – or anyone you know.
There are publications writing reviews, lining up to tell you that this is the new gold standard in celeb memoir. That it is also the new turning point in survivor stories. A new lens for understanding trauma. And I am not trying to diminish those takes, because maybe that’s entirely true. But it’s certainly closer to the literally equivalent of her star-turn in that brilliant Safdie/Sandler film than it is the car-crash red-carpet interviews where she is allegedly misunderstood. And yet maybe, she was right there too. So far I am thinking this book is also somehow a masterpiece?