Down the Drain

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Fox wrote that she shot down the idea at first, but she said he told her, "If you're worried about me embarrassing you, I wouldn't do that. But Fox’s book, “ Down the Drain,” only briefly engages with these developments, which turn out to be some of the least compelling aspects of her story. By their third date, her new stylist told her to meet her in the restaurant bathroom where she was on a dinner date.

There's a sense that much of this narrative is fictionalized and glossed over -- and for good reason, as you'll find a majority of these stories are pretty unflattering for all involved, and not to its detriment -- but everything is well-told and dishy. Described here only as “the artist”, West invites Fox – who, now sober, had just given birth to her son Valentino, an odd choice given her dominatrix name was Valentina – to meet him at a club on New Year’s Eve in 2021.

The actress and model has worn many hats in her 33 years — including fashion designer and dominatrix — but says she is wary of the title “celebrity. The choice to use present tense rather than past puts the reader right there with her, experiencing all of her confusion, fear and innocence. Rachel, complementing the book and her ability to find herself in all kinds of situations, and I only hope with the release of this book that she’s just going to keep getting more successful. Instead, Fox is the opposite of a nihilist in a world increasingly committed to the bit that nothing is real. In one passage, Fox has a miscarriage in the toilet of a bar without knowing she was pregnant, gets back at a fellow dominatrix who peed on her clothes in the dungeon where she works by pouring an enema bag of her own excrement into her locker, and overdoses on various substances multiple times.

This may seem disturbing, but Fox doesn’t apply the judgement of hindsight, and keeps the reader uncomfortably embedded in her child’s psyche. The multihyphenate revealed the body of work at last year’s Oscars after-party, saying “It was a memoir at first, but now it’s just like my first book.Fox does the opposite, allowing the reader to feel all of her experience from the perspective of her age at the time of the events. In her lowest and highest moments, it is the women alongside her who have created a future of love and happiness. But by the time I had finished this book, I was struggling to find a word short of “masterpiece” to describe it myself. She inspired the character in her break out role in the Safdie Brothers' Uncut Gems and has acted in numerous films since. 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.

So much happens to her that, at times, her memoir reads like a thriller: gangsters, kidnapping, prison, guns, sex and violence, told engagingly with reams of dialogue and a meticulous eye for detail. I commend Julia Fox for being so transparent and honest for laying out the gruesome details of her story. This event is general admission seating, please provide your receipt at the box office for admission.I probably wouldn’t recommend it to a lot of people because of the consistent stories of sex and drugs that might be triggering/overwhelming to some but it’s undeniably interesting.