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Table of Contents
About The Book
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.
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
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (October 10, 2023)
- Length: 336 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668011508
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Raves and Reviews
"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
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