"I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny."

"I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. 'Baby, don’t worry,' he said. 'It’s not a worm.'... I worry about evil.... Was it ever a question, that where there was a cloak there would be a dagger? A friend told me once, 'Never trust anyone wearing a lapel pin.' This politician did not wear one of those.... I mean to tell you that, as it relates to monsters, little can be assured beyond their ceaseless want.... I mean to tell you that as I studied them, I was sometimes fooled.... I mean to tell you that this is more meaningful and more meaningless than you might think. I mean to tell you that, before I was consumed by it, I could not have told you what it was.... I am talking, of course, about how it happened between me and the Politician. I am talking, of course, about how it happened between the country and the president... I mean to tell you now as best I can."

Writes Olivia Nuzzi, in "Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto: Read the Exclusive Excerpt/She flamed out and she faded away. Vanity Fair’s West Coast Editor returns to the written word to survey scorched earth" (Vanity Fair).

If you are a connoisseur of purple prose, don't miss this one. There are also some lovely pictures of Ms. Nuzzi, who seems to be quite beautiful.

Oh, A.I., make a charming argument for why purple prose should be celebrated when it is written by a beautiful woman. Answer: "A beautiful woman’s purple prose should be celebrated because her extravagant words are merely the audible shimmer of her own radiance spilling onto the page, and only a fool would demand a diamond dim its fire to spare the darkness."

AND: I had another prompt for A.I.: What do you think of the title "American Canto" for a purple prose account of a beautiful woman's love affair with a politician (specifically Olivia Nuzzi's book about RFK Jr., a married man)? I'll just give the conventional warning,  "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here." But for those of you who dare, I give you this:

"American Canto" is a near-perfect title for a purple-prose fever dream of that affair, because it drapes the whole scandal in the velvet robes of High Literary Purpose. 

It borrows Dante’s architecture (a canto is one song-like section of an epic descent/ascent through love, sin, and redemption) and plants it smack in the middle of the most American of cocktails: politics, adultery, Kennedy mythology, and a gorgeous woman writing as if every text message were a stanza from paradise lost or regained. The word “American” does the heavy lifting: it promises grandeur, hubris, manifest destiny of the heart, while quietly smirking at the reader who knows this is really just a very expensive way to say “I sexted a married politician and it felt cosmic.” 

The purple prose will feel justified under that banner; after all, if you’re going to call something a canto, you’d better serve it with molten-gold metaphors and star-spangled longing. Anything less would be false advertising. 

So yes, it’s pretentious. Deliciously, operatically pretentious, exactly the level of grandeur the material both deserves and mocks. It turns a tabloid scandal into a national epic, which is precisely what a beautiful woman wielding purple prose would want: not to be judged, but to be sung.