Julia Fox’s No Holds Barred Biography Favors Shock Value Over Reflection
By Emma Thimgren
During the last two years, we have come to know Julia Fox not only as the latest it girl and fashion icon but also as a model, writer and actress. Ever since her highly publicized, two-month-long, relationship with Kanye West, she crossed over from a locally known New York profile to a worldwide celebrity. “The exposure was priceless, but I do think eventually I’ll surpass the Kanye narrative. Believe it or not, Kanye’s not the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me,” and sure enough, he wasn’t.
In her new memoir, Down the Drain, she even goes as far as to claim: “I single-handedly started every trend of 2022”. Letting the hyperbole slide, she isn’t exactly wrong either. She certainly popularized the look meant to repel men, characterized by bleached eyebrows, bold eye makeup and experimental fashion. She says to The New Yorker, “I wanted to look a certain way where the girls would appreciate it and the men would despise it.” As soon as she stepped outside, something she said or wore went viral. Later, she proclaimed that “ugly is in”, a sentiment her female audience seemed to feel liberated by. The fact that the words were spoken by a model didn’t seem to matter.
Mythologizing herself in real time as she has been doing her whole life, a memoir seemed inevitable, that Fox would follow the trend of the last decade of releasing a memoir not at the end of, but rather during the peak of, one’s career wasn’t a shock either, but feels premature all the same.
Down the Drain starts when Fox arrives in New York from Italy. She is six years old and doesn’t know the language, but the possibilities of the new city feel exciting as she already feels she is destined for fame. From here, Fox vulnerably details her chaotic upbringing, toxic family dynamic and the struggle to find herself in her new country. Early on, she starts rebelling, and with no real adult supervision, she is left to roam the streets of New York. Fox is not even a teenager when she starts drinking, and soon she moves on to heavier stuff. Time and time again she manages to land on her feet and escape consequences — as the title infers, she keeps throwing her life down the drain. There is never any real pressing reason to quit the drugs until she starts losing her friends to them.
Written in the present tense, Fox never interferes with comments on the events from her older and wiser self. The tone is instead kept naively innocent as we’re transferred back to her youth. The memoir manages to be simultaneously grandiose and mundane and is pillared by the relationships in Fox’s life, so much so that she spends more time describing her friends and boyfriends than herself. The book is much more honest than celebrity memoirs tend to be, in true Catholic fashion, it feels as though we’re on the other side of her confessional, but although she lays it all out — recounting everything from her time working as a dominatrix, to squatting between two cars on the street to use a douche, and smuggling heroin in her vagina — Fox’s storytelling is almost completely devoid of deeper emotions – she never stops to reflect. Some critics have pointed out that they much prefer this to the often demanded trauma porn — that expecting more would be to ask for remorse or to victim blame, but without any deeper analysis, the writing feels distant and superficial. Eventful and entertaining, sure, but it reads more like a play-by-play than a memoir.
She refuses to name-drop. It is only in the last chapter that Fox finally delves into the whole Kanye saga. Now, I’m not saying that he needs to take up any more space than necessary, but it’s undoubtedly due to him that most of the readers got to know Fox. The period after her quick rise to fame is one that many would be most interested in, and from this, we get almost nothing.
As Down the Drain progresses, Fox finds her stride, the storytelling blooming more with each page, but when shock value is what we have come to expect from her, how will she swerve when even that becomes too predictable? It’s in the moments where her true reactions and raw emotions shine through that the writing comes alive. Again, this appears only in the last chapter. If she had approached different topics thematically in a collection of essays, maybe we would have had access to more of her reflections.
“I can’t walk a block without people stopping me to express their gratitude for the hope I give them. They say they love my authenticity and describe me as ‘real’,” she writes in the final pages. Somehow, it is this authenticity that has also dubbed Fox accessible to her followers. However, there is very little that’s relatable about her curated aesthetic and privileged life being supported by millionaire sugar daddies. You get the feeling that Fox wishes to rise above the celebrity aspect.
“I’m not a celebrity and I don’t claim that title. I’m an artist in the role of a lifetime, playing Me. And nothing about my life has changed,” she writes. Acknowledging her status as a celebrity would undoubtedly tarnish her relatable image, something true for many celebrities who build their whole brand on being humbly accessible — but this is simply not true. Everything has changed, a type of unimaginable shift that would be interesting to hear her thoughts on, not because she wasn’t worthy of it before Kanye, but because she’s now a part of the Western cultural zeitgeist. Not acknowledging this feels like more of a facade than embracing it would have been. ♦