‘I could go to therapy and unpack it all – but I don’t have time for that’: Julia Fox on chaos, kink and dating Kanye West

There is a motif running through Julia Fox’s new memoir that hints at the incredulity one may experience while reading it. “I can’t believe this is my life,” writes the 33-year-old in Down the Drain, and the phrase is not a rhetorical flourish. The story of her rackety early years in 2000s Manhattan takes in periods as a runaway, an artist, a dominatrix and a provocateur of a kind that grows out of a very particular (and unsupervised) downtown New York childhood. She has overdosed twice; been in a series of abusive relationships with men, starting in her mid-teens; and fleetingly been committed to a psychiatric ward – and this is before she appears in a hit movie and becomes tabloid bait for briefly dating a controlling and coercive superstar. As a result, says Fox, she was for a long time a titanic pain in the arse to almost everyone she encountered. “I really hated when people felt bad for me. So it’s almost like I was an asshole on purpose, to prevent that pity. I was a jerk – entitled and selfish. But I feel like you have to be when you’re in survival mode.”

That survival mode is still in place, although, Fox hopes, these days it manifests in somewhat diluted form. Since 2019, when she won her first acting role in the movie alongside Adam Sandler, her persona has been outsized and conscientiously unruly; in the years following her debut, she would appear on the red carpet pulling wild faces and mouthing off about her own genius, or posting drunken screeds about her ex-husband on Instagram (“Have you seen this deadbeat dad?”). That’s not how she appears today. At a studio in Manhattan, Fox is pale, quiet, thoughtful, younger-seeming than her age – when I ask how old she is, she says without thinking, “22”, before correcting herself – in shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops. She speaks with the flat, nasal affect of someone trying to repurpose a lot of memories from the bad into the merely boring, an objective she certainly achieves in the memoir, a picaresque tale told with a jauntiness often at odds with the events she is describing, and that she embarked on, she says, partly out of a love of writing and partly to make sense of everything that has happened to her. It is also, I suspect,. “I tried to be as fair as I could and as truthful as I could. It was a purge, I would say.” For long stretches of the book, I itched to reach back, retrospectively, and call social services.