Manhattan It girl Julia Fox lets it all hang out

Down the Drain ★★★★ 
Julia Fox
4th Estate

“Sometime you have to say fuck it and throw your life down the drain just to see where you'll come out on the other side,” former NYC club kid, recovered drug addict, multidisciplinary artist, actress, It girl and style icon Julia Fox writes in her memoir. 

Two adages which certainly permeate the pages of Italian-born and New York-raised Fox's unpredictable, volatile, wild, thrill-fuelled life. 

“Fuck it” in that Fox maintains a near-anarchic disdain towards societal constraints and expectations as depicted in both how she expresses herself artistically and sartorially speaking, her penchant for underage drinking and jolling, and a fierce antipathy towards law enforcement as she recounts her shoplifting and brushes with the police. 

As for “throwing your life down the drain” ... 

A teenage Fox is at the receiving end of these words during a court appearance — because yes, arrests, indictments and missed court appearances played a significant role in her turbulent teens.

Emigrating to New York at the age of six, Fox leaves behind the small town of Saronno where she, her brother, mother and father lived in a small flat with her grandfather with whom she had a close relationship, describing him as “the only source of unconditional love I know. He is home”. 

A home to call one's own is a near-foreign concept to Fox who spent much of her youth staying with friends owing to the unwelcome environment of sharing a small flat with parents who are either absent or arguing: if Fox's childhood were to be accompanied by a soundtrack it would be one of white noise, for her modus operandi when attempting to either drown out her parents' verbal abuse or muffle the sound of her tears was to escape to the bathroom with a hairdryer on full blast.

Fox finds solace — and solidarity — in befriending the creative and the rebellious, with much of her adolescent exploits reading like a near-fever dream:

“We venture to rooftop gatherings in the Lower East Side, we go to punk shows and raves, we sip forties [a type of slurpee] and Four Lokos [a potent alcoholic drink] in community gardens and smoke joints by the river late at night ... We go to free cribs during the day and drink stolen liquor until the sun goes down. We get our free meals at the Pink Pony and then hit Lucky Cheng's for the cheap booze. We bounce around nightclubs all over the Meatpacking District, ending up in seedy after-hours spots all over the city, with shady characters who have money to spare. The party never seems to end, it consumes me.” 

When spending a summer in Italy with her cousin Chiara (who “doesn't wear as much makeup as me and she certainly doesn't wear thongs or padded bras”), Chiara's comment of "[y]ou're such a show-off” is met with an "'I'm American now ... Italian women are raised to be modest and blend in,” echoes Fox's sentiment of wanting to be the antithesis of the norm. 

It is also during that holiday where the then-14-year-old Fox loses her virginity to one “Giovanni”* — a suave, Porsche-driving, Anima Nera-chugging Italian nearly twice her age.

*The disclaimer “Identities have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty” precede the first chapter of Fox's memoir, with “The Artist” serving as pseudonym for Kanye West, with whom Fox had a brief, yet highly publicised relationship in 2022. 

(A dramatis personae would have been a welcome addition/addenda methinks because Fox meets, befriends, beguiles, disgusts, entices many — many — people in the US and Italy alike...)

Back to the cult of Kanye:

Described as a “master gaslighter”, West/The Artist is depicted as controlling, narcissistic and unsupportive, with Fox recounting the memory of their break-up: 

“The next day, I text him that I'm not having fun any more in this relationship, to which he asks me not to leave him. 'If you loved me, you would support me,' he says ... We speak on the phone one last time. He tells me had a good conversation with his soon to be ex-wife and discovered a lot of information about me. 'I didn't know you were a drug addict,' he says as if I duped him. 'I told you! Maybe if you listened more. And not to mention, so were you!'” 

Fox candidly writes about experimenting with a multitude of drugs in her youth with marijuana being her preferred illicit substance. Yet her dependency on weed (d)evolves into a heroin addiction.

“This is the feeling that Lou Reed sang about in the Velvet Underground ... I know I'm flirting with fire, but it's just too damn good to resist,” she writes of her first encounter with the morphinan opioid which nearly kills her. 

For as exhilarating as her life story seems/reads, as devastatingly intense it can be too, with Fox recounting several overdoses, one which occurs shortly after the passage above: “I wake in my hallway half naked with my neighbours towering over me. Paramedics kneel over me with an oxygen mask. They shot me up with Narcan to counteract the heroin ... I hear my neighbour telling the paramedics, 'A guy dragged her down the stairs and pounded on all our doors to call the cops'.”

She furthermore candidly writes about her abusive relationship with a drug dealer, and sincerely reflects on losing three of her closest friends to fatal drug overdoses.

Yes, drugs and sex imbue the pages of her memoir, yet Fox isn't an agent provocateur setting out to promote salaciousness or illicitness: her vulnerability is tangible as she shares her childhood memories devoid of a sense of belonging and family; her tempestuous adolescence filled with feelings of uncertainty and insecurity; her stint as a dominatrix in a dungeon in Chelsea which truly reflected her chameleonic personality (“I never turn down a job. I revel in the fact that I can be anyone at any given time. I transform into your mean mommy, an evil nun, the bitchy popular girl in high school”); her involvement with a wealthy, controlling sugar daddy; a brief and unhealthy marriage; and — ultimately — motherhood. 

At times the prose reads disjointedly yet this isn't a reflection of shabby writing but rather the trajectory of Fox's life: one of disruption, upheaval, adventure; a life initially characterised by Sturm und Drang, evolving into one of self-discovery: to be, and express, oneself with a geen skaam attitude.

And the former NYC club kid, recovered drug addict, multidisciplinary artist, actress, It girl and style icon aptly concludes her gritty, enthralling, evocative, and deeply authentic memoir with this exact mindset:

"... an unfamiliar feeling envelops me: joy. Everywhere I turn, I see girls dressed like me ... I was ridiculed for being different and for doing whatever I had to do to survive.

Now everybody's wearing Latex.”

Fox yes, Julia.