Notorious bad-girl writer has no apologies
Ask Cat Marnell, the former Condé Nast beauty editor who has documented her decades-long drug addiction in shamelessly scandalous columns for Vice and xoJane, whether her new memoir, “How to Murder Your Life,” (Simon & Schuster, $26.99) glorifies drug abuse, and she doesn’t skip a beat. “Sure! It’s glorious,” she breezily replies. “Drug abuse: It’s fun.”
Marnell’s book is noteworthy for its compelling twin narratives of a rising young magazine talent and of her simultaneous downward spiral into a death-defying loop of substance abuse, insomnia, bulimia and violent relationships — all told in a prose style that is like a spit in the face to an English teacher. Her emphatic capitalization and charmingly sarcastic colloquialisms, crass irreverence and staggering self-awareness are themselves, forgive the figure of speech, addictive.
But Marnell’s foray into the literary world is also raising a stir because, unlike many addiction memoirs, hers does not end in sobriety. She is to this day unapologetically a self-described addict.
I arrive at her Chinatown apartment at 7 p.m. and Marnell greets me in the stairwell, surprisingly upbeat, if frazzled. Dressed in loose jeans, sneakers, a white wife beater and a wig of long, robin’s egg blue hair, she breathlessly explains she just cannot stand to talk to another journalist in this apartment. After several minutes and outfit changes, Marnell reappears in the same T-shirt and jeans with a zipup hoodie. She pops a pill and we head out.
Settled into a booth in a f luorescent-lit, sparsely populated hotel bar on Bowery with glasses of white wine, it feels like we’re just two friends meeting for after-work drinks, prattling about living on Canal Street, whether we want to have kids someday (she does) and how the only straight men at Condé Nast are the Urban Express delivery guys (I was once an editorial assistant there too).
She dispels comparisons the media have made between her and the towering figures of last century’s counter-culture literati: “I never read Hunter S. Thompson, but I saw the Johnny Depp movie. I’ve never read William S. Burroughs. Someone called me ‘Hunter S. Tampon’ on Twitter; I liked that.” Despite her confidence, though, her need to self-protect is unmistakable in both her drawn body language and her habit of qualifying convictions with a compulsive “I don’t know.” This demeanor, on top of her almost animated-dolllike appearance and dainty frame, makes her seem so much younger than her 34 years.
Once she tells me about the audience she envisioned while writing the book, this persona makes sense. “I wrote it for young, messy people,” she says. “I stopped answering in my head to the people who are going to be writing my reviews and started talking to teens. I wrote it with someone like Bella Hadid in my head.” She explains that older readers are disdainful and make her “feel like a little hobo. But younger kids don’t talk to me like I’m some exploited weirdo. They come to me and want my help. Once I started writing for young people, then I could just be the teenybopper that I am. And that’s when the prose became more bubblegum and I started really enjoying it, because I wasn’t in a defensive place.”
Marnell writes that she began taking Ritalin at boarding school at age 15 thanks to a prescription provided by her father, a hospital psychiatrist. “I had a very privileged childhood,” she says, “but I also had a dysfunctional family.”
“Daddy issues are for amateurs,” she jokes, but adds in a serious tone: “My mom was sick: She was anorexic and very closed off. So I never developed that self-parent that was like, ‘Cat, go to bed!’ ”
Although she still takes amphetamines daily — “Adderall is in my life just as much as food is in other people’s lives” — she swears she has had to cut back on the hard stuff. Despite her larger-than-life tales and crafted image as the delinquent problem child of the Manhattan publishing scene, Marnell says she is actually a “control freak” who takes precautions while using. “I’m very delicate because of how much I’ve messed with myself,” she says. “I can’t do a lot of coke or ecstasy or MDMA like my party friends. I can’t even get as drunk as they can, because at this point my constitution, my brain will not handle it.” Once her glass is empty, she moves on to mine. “We [drug addicts] are told that you either have to get clean or you’re a disaster,” she continues. “But there has to be something in the middle. Can’t people just try to get better?”
What’s motivated Marnell to make this ambiguous semi-recovery, if you will, is the same ambitious side that made her so successful as a beauty editor. Through the career highs and lows since her days at Condé Nast’s tony offices, she’s never lost that drive. “I’ve been taking care of myself because I’m proud of this book, and I love having a reader,” she says.
A typical day in Marnell’s life involves waking up at around 2 p.m. (after staying up until dawn watching TV with one of her graffiti-artist friends) and immediately ordering food on Seamless: a healthy smoothie and turkey bacon, to eat after she has rapidly consumed and purged cake and mozzarella sticks. “When you wake up, you have to answer to your addiction,” she says. “And then I took my Adderall to kill my appetite, and then I had my breakfast. Like, I would never throw up turkey bacon and a smoothie. I just got the bulimia out of the way, and then I lived my day as usual.”
In 2013, Marnell got a highly publicized $500,000 advance. “My life got really crazy when I got my book money,” she explains. “I got really glamorous, and happy in a lot of ways, but also really sick.” Now she’s working on another book. “I wrote the first one straightforward. The next one’s getting weird.”