On the Shelf
Down the Drain: A Memoir
By Julia Fox
Simon & Schuster: 336 pages, $29
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Seeing Julia Fox seated in a millennial pink restaurant is almost as shocking as watching her daringly strut along the streets of New York City in a metal barely-there bikini and a black trench coat. But even if the actress and model, 33, weren’t sporting an oversize vintage tee featuring a Persian bodybuilder and a camo cap emblazoned with the word “Salem’’ over crimson hair, she couldn’t blend in if she tried. The second she enters this Italian eatery, the hostess anxiously beams, “You’re Julia Fox,” and the owner, whom she knows, frequents the table to offer menu updates and give her branded merch and condoms.
She may be the star of “Uncut Gems” and a regular social media meme whose brief relationship with Kanye West famously took over the tabloids, but on the Lower East Side, she’s a known character. The world beyond is also about to know her better. Fox is ready to speak for herself as she enters her author era — and boy, does she have stories to tell.
“Down the Drain,” Fox’s debut memoir, spares no one, least of all herself, in its shocking tales of a New York wild child. When asked about the book earlier this year, she initially referred to it as a “masterpiece,” and not exactly a memoir. She does concede now that some timelines have been altered and characters composited. But even beyond that, it makes sense that she was hesitant to box it in: Fox’s life as she knows it was an amalgamation of soap opera, Mafia flick and “A Star Is Born” topped with a heaping of heroin.
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What isn’t surprising is that she wrote a book. Fox believes she was meant to be a writer someday, and she’s pretty sure she manifested it. “That’s why I’m always talking about manifestation, because I feel like I’ve seen it be real,” she exclaims. “Or maybe it’s just a coincidence. I don’t know. But it seems a little bit too on the nose.” To be fair, several people she encountered over the years also told her she’d be famous and, well, that happened too.
The actual writing didn’t begin until October 2022. It took her between three and six months to finish it, and yes, she wrote it herself. One of the greatest challenges was what to leave out. “I felt like there could’ve been a memoir about each chapter,” she says.
She’s not wrong. Suffice it to say her dalliance with West (sexless, she claims) only amplified a notoriety she’d been courting since birth. “Down the Drain” is teeming with nuclear-level anecdotes, alongside accounts of troubling interactions with family, friends and lovers — everything ranging from neglect to sexual assault. But this is no clear-cut trauma plot. “I feel like people just have such black-and-white thinking,” she says. “They don’t understand that life is a gray area.”
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It begins with a chaotic upbringing — a distant mother who lives in Italy and a father who struggles to parent. “I don’t want people to think my dad’s such an a—, because he’s not,” she says now. “He’s just neurodivergent and was doing the best he could. Now that I’m a parent” — Fox has a 2-year-old son, Valentino, with her ex-husband, Peter Artemiev — “I have way more sympathy for how hard it is.”
Fox has her first kiss at 11 with a man who’s 26, tries heroin for the first time in high school and ends up in an abusive relationship with a drug dealer who stalks her from prison. By 18, she is working as a dominatrix under the name Valentina, flaunting her talent for revenge by depositing her waste in the locker of a colleague who destroyed her Jimmy Choos.
“Uncut Gems” actor Julia Fox has confirmed her breakup with rapper Ye after a whirlwind romance and comparisons to his estranged wife, Kim Kardashian.
“I wasn’t always like that,” Fox explains while delicately sipping a strawberry lemonade slushie. “But when the alternative is just rolling over and taking it all the time, eventually you’re going to be like, ‘No, f— that.’ There was a point where it was like a suicide bombing mission. Like, I don’t care if I die, but I need to take you down with me.”
Fox’s time as a dominatrix is integral to her story; it taught her how to act, how to wear fashion, how to respect herself. “Before that, I had really low self-esteem,” she recalls. “I was really promiscuous and I would sleep around a lot, and then after, not at all. I would not be here today if I hadn’t been a dominatrix.”
She means this literally. The arc of the book bends toward Fox stepping into her power, but the dangers along the way are grave: miscarriage, homelessness, overdoses and serial mistreatment by men — from the alleged sexual assault that was her first intimate experience to being punched while she’s pregnant by an old boyfriend.
It took Fox years to come to terms with the idea that she was assaulted. “It wasn’t until probably my mid to late 20s that I even realized that wasn’t normal because it was happening to everyone I knew,” she says. “It was so normalized that I didn’t even question it, and I didn’t want to question it. I just pretended like it didn’t happen.”
She remembers this when she hears the skepticism over allegations made by women: “‘Why did you come out so late? Why didn’t you say no? Why didn’t you yell and get up and scream?’ It’s like, because we’re convincing ourselves that it’s not happening … but then when our back’s against the wall because it’s eating us up inside, we have to say something. And then there’s all this backlash.”
Sometimes in life, things right themselves, and you don’t even have to lift a finger.
— Julia Fox
Eventually Fox reached a point where she couldn’t avert her eyes any longer, when she realized, “‘Holy s—. I’ve been victimized my entire life.’”
She began to fight back in her own way, with the tools she had at the time.
“I was like, ‘OK, how can I benefit from it? I’ll play into this whatever it is, but I’m going to get something out of it,’ instead of walking away empty-handed and losing my soul.”
For instance, she once woke up in a billionaire’s bed, unsure if he had assaulted her, and decided his offer to replace her diamond earrings would help assuage her pain. Fox has since come to believe that karma can be the coldest revenge. “Sometimes in life, things right themselves, and you don’t even have to lift a finger,” she says with a shrug.
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It’s Fox’s “new take” on vengeance — and a sharp contrast with her behavior only a year ago: On a “revenge tour” against Artemiev, she eviscerated her ex online and proceeded to date Kanye.
Fox dives into great detail about her whirlwind “relationship” with Ye, whom she labels “the artist” in her book. “I really understood him on a visceral level,” she recalls. Initially, Fox thought it “could be something real.” She also figured, as a longtime fan of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” that she could “get him off Kim’s case” — as she said in a now-deleted TikTok video. “I thought ultimately I’d be helping a precarious situation, but I learned very quickly that I was being weaponized,” she explains. “I just felt like his little puppet.”
Fox insists she “went lightly” in describing their relationship in the book, but she never signed an NDA. “I’m not signing a f— NDA just on principle. I never have, and I never will,” she says before quickly adding, “unless it’s a professional opportunity, then sure.”
Despite the media attention the relationship brought — including an Interview Magazine shoot and article that Fox says she was unaware of until it was happening — she’d rather shake the association today. “It really wasn’t that big of a deal, but other people made it such a big deal,” she says of their time together. Fox says she suspects she’s been blacklisted at times since the end of the affair. “I know for a fact I’ve been up for certain things and couldn’t do it because of dating Kanye. It’s kind of wild.”
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Fox’s author era is also her celibate era. Earlier this year she publicly swore off men, but she says the cleanse has been going on longer than that. “I haven’t had sex in two years. I’m so happy. I sleep so well,” she says, laughing with her mouth full. Has she dated at all during that time? She replies with a whiff of boredom. “For what? No. I don’t see the point. That romanticized idea of men doesn’t exist anymore.”
She finds all the emotional fulfillment she needs with Valentino, she says: “All the validation I could ever get, I get from my son — the love, the intimacy, the closeness. We co-sleep at night. I have all of that. I wouldn’t want anyone to come in and take my attention or time away from my son.”
Last year, Fox told comedian-writer Ziwe Fumudoh she has a “gay bone.” In the memoir, she expands on this, relating early kisses with female friends and repressed feelings for her best friend, Gianna, whom she met in Alcoholics Anonymous. Gianna confessed her desire for Fox, but Fox decided to marry Artemiev while doing her best to preserve the friendship. Gianna eventually died of an overdose.
“If I were to have been open with my sexuality, I would’ve been with Gianna,” Fox says now. “We were low-key in love. There were times when we would do sexual things, and then never talk about it.” She grows quiet as she recounts a friendship she now sees as tinged with denial “and just fear of losing her — and then, I ended up losing her anyway.” She still struggles with it. “If I could bring her back to life, I would trade everything apart from my son. Every dollar in my bank account, every achievement, every other person in my life. She died, and I was never the same again.”
All the validation I could ever get, I get from my son — the love, the intimacy, the closeness. We co-sleep at night.
— Julia Fox
In light of her experiences with men and women, it’s fair to ask why she doesn’t just date the latter. “I think I’m just so afraid to open that can of worms,” she says, “because I know that once I do, that’s it. There’s no coming back from it, and I know that I’ll just be a lesbian. It will happen, eventually. I’m just prolonging it, personally, because I’m afraid.”
After years of addiction and the loss of two friends to overdoses, she also has a healthy fear of opiates. “I take Suboxone. It saved my life, for sure,” she says. But she also put herself in her friends’ shoes. “If I died from opiates, and then I found out they were still using opiates, I’d be so mad from the grave I’d haunt their asses,” she quips while sucking a vape.
The rising star, who died Monday at 25, stood out through subtlety in a cast full of bigger names and a series full of bombastic set pieces.
Being in the spotlight hasn’t tempted her to relapse, she says. “I have tunnel vision. I’m on a mission. I can’t get caught up. It’s not cute. I’m 33. I’ve learned my lesson, believe it or not. It’s just not worth it.” The biggest misconception, she says, is that she’s a “Hollywood celebrity” who does drugs or takes Ozempic. “It’s so far from the truth,” she says. The wild-child image is an artifact, she insists — even if its persistence is an illusion she sometimes cultivates.
It’s an illusion you feel she might be eager to drop, now that there are far more tools available to her than during her dominatrix days. She wants to write, make movies and TV shows. She’s already had conversations around an adaptation of the memoir. She dreams of having a production company, perhaps directing and making documentaries.
“I hope that one day I can fade into the background,” she says. “Let the work speak for itself.”
Fox comes to L.A. to discuss her memoir with Joey Soloway on Oct. 23 at the Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center — a Live Talks Los Angeles event.
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