Down the Drain

by Julia Fox

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Now a major cultural icon, Julia Fox’s life story is riveting, and she’s here to tell it all in Down the Drain. Great for fans of Emily Ratajkowski and Jennette McCurdy, it is unique, yet universal; singular, yet expansive.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The hotly anticipated book from “one of the all-time pop-culture greats” (New York magazine) that chronicles her shocking life and unyielding determination to not only survive but achieve her dreams.

Julia Fox is famous for many things: her captivating acting, such as her breakout role in the film Uncut Gems; her trendsetting style, including bleached eyebrows, exaggerated eyeshadow, and cutout dresses; her mastery of social media, where she entertains and educates her millions of followers. But all these share the trait for which she is most famous: unabashedly and unapologetically being herself.

This commitment to authenticity has never been more on display than in Down the Drain. With writing that is both eloquent and accessible, Fox recounts her turbulent path to cultural supremacy: her parents’ volatile relationship that divided her childhood between Italy and New York City and left her largely raising herself; a possessive and abusive drug-dealing boyfriend whose torment continued even from within Rikers Island; her own trips to jail as well as to a psychiatric hospital; her work as a dominatrix that led to a complicated entanglement with a sugar daddy; a heroin habit that led to New Orleans trap houses and that she would kick only after the fatal overdose of her best friend; her own near-lethal overdoses and the deaths of still more friends from drugs and suicide; an emotionally explosive, tabloid-dominating romance with a figure she dubs “The Artist”; a whirlwind, short-lived marriage and her trials as a single parent striving to support her young son. Yet as extraordinary as her story is, its universality is what makes it so powerful. Fox doesn’t just capture her improbable evolution from grade-school outcast to fashion-world icon, she captures her transition from girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. Family and friendship, sex and death, violence and love, money and power, innocence and experience—it’s all here, in raw, remarkable, and riveting detail.

More than a year before the book’s publication, Fox’s description of it as “a masterpiece” in a red carpet interview went viral. As always, she was just being honest. Down the Drain is a true literary achievement, as one-of-a-kind as its author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668011508
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	18,558
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Julia Fox is a multidisciplinary artist. She’s had a fashion label, published art books, and held numerous exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. She inspired the character in her break out role in the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems and has acted in numerous films since. She’s a fashion darling and muse and continues to inspire designers with her bold looks. She’s a strong advocate for sustainability and a do-it-yourself attitude. She cohosts a podcast called Forbidden Fruits. She is a single mom and currently lives in New York City with her son Valentino.

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Publishers Weekly

"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 victimized—and 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

From the Publisher

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.

Kirkus Reviews

One of the all-time pop-culture greats.”

praise for the author New York magazine