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Down the Drain

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What to expect

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.

‘Intense and compelling’ SUNDAY TIMES

'A gripping and powerful coming-of-age story' TELEGRAPH

‘A masterpiece’ GREG JAMES, BBC RADIO 1

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. 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. 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 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.

Critics Review

  • ‘Most startling of memoirs. Within two chapters I, too, was hooked … Fans of Edie Sedgwick, Cookie Mueller and Courtney Love will die for Down The Drain … I think I just accidentally landed on my book of the year’ Paul Flyn, Evening Standard

    ‘A gripping and powerful coming-of-age story that exposes the terrible repercussions of childhood neglect, society’s routine exploitation of the female body and the hollowness of celebrity’ Telegraph

    ‘Intense and compelling’ Sunday Times

    ‘A masterpiece’ Greg James, Radio 1

    ‘Fox’s willingness to be honest about what has happened to her and the shame she sometimes feels provides a sharp alternative to most survivor narratives that are publicized. She’s an artist who translates her relationships, her overdoses, and other near-death experiences into the art she makes’ Elizabeth Nicholas, The Cut

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