One day, my friend sent me an audio excerpt from "Down the Drain" via Instagram messenger. I was so shocked and riveted that my immediate assumption was that it was fiction. When he told me that no, it was actually Julia Fox's memoir, I knew immediately that I had to read it.
"Down the Drain" is an appropriately fitting title for a chronicle of Fox's life up to this point, because I'm honestly surprised that she's still alive with everything she went through.
It starts fittingly when she arrives in New York City as a child, exclaiming in her native Italian at the iconic sight of the Manhattan skyscrapers. What follows is a chronological account (mostly set in New York but occasionally in Italy) about learning how to adapt to a new country while growing up in a dysfunctional, toxic family.
The accounts from her teenage years and her 20's are nothing short of jaw-dropping, to say the least. The circumstances she found herself in, including a decades-long struggle with drug addiction and working as a dominatrix in a Manhattan dungeon, are lurid, yes, but also reveal an underlying element of sadness at growing up in a family where her narcissistic parents essentially placed her on the back-burner, leaving her to navigate adolescence on her own.
"Down the Drain" is, as I expected, a definite page-turner. Fox knows how to draw the reader in and write eloquently through vividly-recalled memories that add further context to who she is today.
However, the accounts are so vivid (starting from an extremely young age), that I have to wonder if some of the recollections are exaggerations. Considering the amount of trauma and abuse she has endured (particularly from men), it is a little difficult to believe that she recalls her entire life up to this point so graphically. Speaking from firsthand knowledge, it is nearly always guaranteed that trauma survivors have huge gaps in their memories due to painful experiences that the mind intentionally blocks out.
Additionally, considering the amount and types of drugs she consumed for so long, it is unlikely she was able to document so many specific instances from this time in exact detail.
Maybe she has a perfect memory and/or did meticulously document everything throughout her entire life, but I do have some reservations.
I also spoke with another friend who is a fan of Julia Fox, but said she didn't care for the book. I have to disagree with her on this. It is well-written and she has an incredible story that needs to be documented.
At times, though, it did feel like a bullet-point list of her life year-by-year. There could have been specific passages, or at least further explorations, of the dynamic with her parents.
What she was going through (particularly in her teenage years) was concerning for me, and I'm not even a parent. It was absurd that they were still letting her go out and hang out with the same people knowing that she was using.
This could just be because I grew up in a home with extremely suffocating parents who wouldn't leave me alone and barely gave me my own space. I wasn't sure if her parents hated her, but there was definitely a dynamic that she didn't explore as to why they were so nonchalant and absent from her life during her formative years.
Rating: 7/10
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