In 2020, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her short story, “Corona Diary.” Born in 1948,[2] she is the only child of Jules Buck (1917–2001), an American film producer, who moved his family to Europe in 1952 in reaction to the political repression in the United States at the time.

As movie critic for American Vogue from 1990 to 1994, she served on the New York Film Festival selection committee the year its program included Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine, Jane Campion's The Piano, and Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

[8] The New York Times described her selection as indication that Condé Nast intended to "modernize the magazine and expand its scope" from its circulation of 80,000.

[23] Buck doubled the magazine's circulation and produced thematic year-end issues on cinema, art, music, sex, and theater.

"[10] Buck was TV critic for US Vogue from 2003 to 2011, also profiling cover subjects such as Marion Cotillard,[26] Carey Mulligan,[27] Natalie Portman, and Gisele Bündchen.

[33] For the New Yorker her subjects included the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, chronicler of Russian émigrés in Paris Nina Berberova, and Princess Diana's relics post-death.

[34][35][36] She has appeared in numerous documentaries, among them James Kent's Fashion Victim, the Killing of Gianni Versace, Mark Kidel's Paris Whorehouse and Architecture of the Imagination.

Buck narrated James Crump's 2007 documentary Black, White + Gray, about art collector Sam Wagstaff and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Her topics have included Patti Smith, the art of the retort, the mother she chose, dressing one's age, and her friendship with Leonard Cohen.

[53] Buck began studying acting in 2002, and appears in a supporting role in Nora Ephron's 2009 movie Julie & Julia as Madame Elisabeth Brassart, head of the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.

In 2010, Buck played Mrs. Prest in an adaptation of The Aspern Papers, a Henry James novella, directed by first-time filmmaker Mariana Hellmund.

[64] In February 2017, she appeared in a production of 18th-century playwright Pierre de Marivaux's The Constant Players at the Henry Clay Frick House in New York, directed by Mériam Korichi.

[65] The next month she was in a Columbia Stages production of Isak Dinesen's Babette's Feast in the East Village, adapted and directed by Pálína Jónsdóttir.

In February 2012, Buck went on "The Unchained Tour of Georgia" headed by George Green on a remodeled 1975 Bluebird schoolbus funded by Kickstarter.

[71][72] In March, 2017, Buck published The Price of Illusion, her memoir of her life in Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, New York, London and Santa Fe from the '60s through the '90s.

"[85] "It seems that Ms. Buck's aim was more public relations spin than reportage,” wrote Bari Weiss and David Feith in The Wall Street Journal.

Quoting Lee Smith, Rubin pointed out that John Kerry, Teresa Heinz, and James A. Baker, among others, courted Assad in an attempt to sway him from Iran.