Julia Fox tries to make sense of notorious past
Why is Julia Fox famous? Your guess is as good as hers. The actress and model has worn many hats in her 33 years but says she is wary of the title “celebrity.” She writes in a new memoir that fame always felt inevitable but isn’t something she sought out.
You could join Fox in splitting hairs between “famous person” and “celebrity,” the latter of which, she suggests, requires a level of intention. But it might be most precise to describe her a third way: notorious. In New York, she has been inescapable, whether as a chaotic teenage force in the party scene or when her face showed up on “missing” posters her parents put up after she ran away from home. She more recently appeared in Harmony Korine’s Supreme ad campaign, dressed in a seductive flight attendant costume.
Her ascent to fame accelerated over the past several years, thanks to her supporting role in A24’s critically acclaimed anxiety attack “Uncut Gems” – the 2019 film in which she plays Adam Sandler’s headstrong love interest, a character inspired by Fox’s life – and a romantic dalliance with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. But Fox’s book, “Down the Drain,” only briefly engages with these developments, which turn out to be some of the least compelling aspects of her story. 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.
Fox writes casually and in the present tense, as if she’s telling her story to friends and trying to transport them to each moment in time. And yet it remains clear as Fox parses her history – which encompasses numerous abusive relationships, extensive drug use and more than one overdose – that she maintains an emotional distance from much of what she writes about. 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.
“It’s impossible for me to flourish in an inconsistent hostile environment, especially when my own growth is so intertwined with his,” she writes. “I’m forced to face the unsettling reality that the people who are supposed to protect us are sometimes the same people we need protection from.”
Fox has taken time to reflect. She became a mother more than two years ago and writes that the experience made her more empathetic toward her father, who stepped up for his grandson. She spots parallels between herself and her mother, an emotionally fraught woman whose father helped raise Fox and her younger brother in Italy for a portion of their childhood.
Fox acknowledges that those cash-strapped years informed her deep desire to be rich. She once prayed for a sugar daddy, and found one.
But as “Down the
Drain” gets closer to the present day, and Fox revisits her failed marriage to her son’s father and backto-back deaths in her chosen family, her habit of trying to tie up loose ends works to her detriment. As a writer, she pushes herself toward tidy emotional resolutions she doesn’t appear to be ready to feel. This stands in stark contrast with the moments when she allows raw emotion to spill onto the page, such as when she details her frustrations with the press.
“In every interview, I’m asked the same questions over and over,” she writes. “All they want is their next viral sound bite. And none of them ask me how I’m doing after so much loss . ... They take my words out of context and twist them around to make me seem dumb. Sometimes I just want to disappear, but I can’t. I have nothing to fall back on, no family wealth, no rich baby daddy.
“I just have to keep going and prove that I’m more than what they make me out to be.”
Fox, while known for her candid nature, is still a public figure with an image to uphold. She went viral last year for describing her book as a “masterpiece.” Although it may not be a grand literary achievement, she projects an admirable confidence. She knows how she wants to be seen and how to get there.
For someone who claims she doesn’t want to be a celebrity, Fox is pretty good at being one.
In 1883, Jackson and Louisa Holcomb bought 100 acres of farmland in Cumberland County, Virginia, not far from where they had grown up in slavery. With earnings from their tobacco crop, over the next few decades they were able to buy, sell and mortgage more land. By 1908, they owned a remarkable 279 acres. Over time they bequeathed some of the land to their children and nieces and nephews, sold other parcels to Black neighbors, and donated some to their church.
The Holcombs were the great-great-greatuncle and -aunt of the historian and legal scholar Dylan C. Penningroth, and their story is at the heart of “Before the Movement,” a deeply researched and counterintuitive history of how ordinary Black Americans used law in their everyday lives from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s. Penningroth reframes the conventional story of civil rights, shifting the focus away from iconic figures, mass protests, strategic lawsuits and federal legislation to highlight a neglected history of deeds, divorce petitions, corporate charters and other legal rights.
“If we want to understand Black people’s demands for the rights that America denied them,” he writes, “we must pay more attention to how they talked about and used the rights that were not denied them – the associational privileges and common-law civil rights they had been exercising for generations in county clerks’ offices and church basements – rights of everyday use.”
Starting in the 1800s, Penningroth shows how enslaved people frequently made agreements with their enslavers, other white people and free Black people, and among themselves. While not legally binding, these deals were grounded in shared understandings about property and contract.
Jackson Holcomb, for example, owned a boat while he was still enslaved and was paid to ferry people across the Appomattox River, including a group of Confederate soldiers who were fleeing after the Battle of Richmond in the spring of 1865. “By the time the soldiers got into Holcomb’s boat in 1865, white southerners were used to seeing Black people own property and make contracts,” Penningroth writes. “Slaves participated routinely, energetically, unequally in the world of law.”
Free Black people also participated extensively in credit, debt and contracts in the decades before the Civil War. According to Penningroth, by 1860, there were more than 16,000 free Black property owners in the South who held property worth nearly $8.8 billion in today’s dollars. Freedom meant that they could ask local judges to protect their rights, and they went to court in cases involving farms, cows and myriad other types of property.
These local transactions and court cases drove Black “civil rights” in the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, Penningroth explains, even as the political and social rights of Black Americans were consistently attacked by white politicians and citizens. Every time the Holcombs bought or sold land, for example, they had a deed recorded at the Cumberland County courthouse. Importantly, while Jackson Holcomb appeared in the “colored” section of the voter roll, his family’s land transactions were in nonsegregated deed books. “It was harder to segregate some areas of law than others,” Penningroth writes. “It was easier to padlock the railcar and voter rolls than the deed books or even the courts.” This meant that Black people were part of the “chain of title,” and, Penningroth writes, “the property system’s emphasis on transparency and continuity meant that there were legal consequences to cheating, murdering, or intimidating Black landowners, even if the criminal justice system refused to act.”
And the Holcombs were not alone. Black homeownership climbed from 43,000 families in 1870 to more than 500,000 families in 1910 (nearly 1 in 4 Black families nationwide). Black farmers owned more than 15 million acres and roughly $208 billion in farm property in today’s dollars. Lynchings also rose sharply in these years, and not coincidentally. “Black landownership represented a threat to white supremacy,” Penningroth writes, and “lynchers often targeted successful Black farmers and businesspeople.” In light of this violence, land was more than just a financial asset, he argues – it was a “refuge from racist oppression, a source of communal pride and identity, and proof that they could be capable citizens at a time when most whites doubted it.”
Penningroth makes expert use of underutilized sources, including deed books, civil and criminal cases, and corporate registries stored in the basements and backrooms of county courthouses. “Before the Movement” is at its best when it gives readers a glimpse of Penningroth’s historical detective work, searching clothbound docket books and neat rows of gray file boxes, trying to decipher “spidery handwriting on yellowing paper, trifolded and tightly packed, sometimes flaking away or chewed by mice and insects.”
From this archive of private-law civil rights, Penningroth persuasively argues that historians and legal scholars have overlooked how extensively ordinary Black people understood and used the law in the century before the modern civil rights movement.
That these legal lives were more mundane than heroic is precisely the point. Penningroth’s tenacious focus on the ordinary is a rejoinder to ongoing efforts to limit African American history. As he concludes, “The basic premise of this book is that Black people’s lives are worth studying in themselves.”