murder, she wrote
Writer Cat Marnell’s revealing memoir is our Book of the Month.
You might know the name Cat Marnell. The 34-year-old – once deemed “New York’s enfant terrible” – was associate beauty editor at the now-defunct Lucky magazine. In 2011, she helped launch women’s lifestyle website xojane, where she published such beauty articles as “Gonna Wash That Angel Dust Right Outta My Hair: ‘Miracle’ (Uh-huh) Treatments To Help You Pass Those Follicle Drug Tests, Naughty Nancys!” and “Pillhead Beauty: The Product I Learned About From My Shrink Dad That I Don’t Even Talk To Anymore”. Her unfiltered blogs detailed her recreational drug use as much as they recommended the best beauty buys. She later went on to write a wildly successful column (still drug-related but now minus the beauty stuff), Amphetamine Logic, for Vice. Her new drug-addled memoir, How To
Murder Your Life, is – well, there’s no other word for it – addictive. Marnell’s leisurely style of prose has a way of putting you right there in the room with her. Sometimes you’re watching her struggle to pronounce tricky beauty brands over the phone as an intern at Nylon; later on, you find out just how Upper East Side “doctor shopping” goes down. Part of her Vice column’s appeal was that readers could witness Marnell’s very public unravelling – “I’ve been smoking weed and watching Keeping Up With
The Kardashians and sipping orange [cold and flu medicine] Nyquil with a straw and looking at myself in the mirror for eight hours” – and this book is effectively an extension of that. Arguably, few people could deny they’re not even the least bit interested in watching a popular figure fall apart (see: Britney Spears, Kanye West).
At its core, the book follows two parallel storylines – one of a young girl who worships magazines and works slavishly to turn her dream into a reality, and the other of a troubled kid from a privileged but dysfunctional family whose spiralling drug addiction will very likely cost her everything. Those two paths are constantly at odds, and often intersect (like the time Marnell called in sick to her boss, xojane editor Jane Pratt, with the email, “Ugh, I did heroin last night and now I’m sick”).
Of course, like all books by and about addicts, this memoir is melancholic. Marnell is unflinchingly honest about her deteriorating quality of life, her disturbed friendships and failure to perform at work amid a never-ending comedown. But for all her issues, Marnell is still a great writer; clever, funny and sharp. By the time you turn the last page, she’ll feel less like a fascinating stranger and more like a friend you adore, in spite of her faults.
How To Murder Your Life ($35, Ebury) is out now