We are fascinated with enfants terribles
Audiences love a renegade artist who lives fast and wild for inspiration.
Cat Marnell is one of those artists, and her latest project, “SelfTanner for the Soul: How I Ran Away to Europe and Found My Inner Glow (When Life Got Dark),” is an example of the more creatively successful confessionals.
Marnell, the selfdescribed “downtown disaster” and “unhealthy health editor,” previously worked for Vice and the nowdefunct Lucky magazine and XOJane website, writing witty, sometimes dangerousfeeling columns about her substance abuse and partying. When her book “How to Murder Your Life” became an international bestseller in 2017, with her stories of success as a beauty editor in New York’s magazine world mixed with the debauched nightlife shenanigans of her 20s, it wasn’t hard to see why. Her style has always been fastpaced, biting and descriptive, like a lipglosstinged Hunter S. Thompson.
If you’re a fan of enfant terrible stories, “SelfTanner for the Soul” is for you.
The Audible Original audio memoir ($29.95) begins after the success of “How to Murder Your Life” in 2017. Marnell flees New York for an Adderall and winefueled monthslong spree in Europe. Traveling with a suitcase full of wigs (Marnell talks vaguely at the beginning of “SelfTanner” about an accident that melted her hair while she was under the influence), she visits beaches, loses her ATM cards, goes through Adderall withdrawals, takes nighttime “wizard walks” where she describes the lights of new cities in nearpoetic language and shrewdly observes party destinations, all in a selfdeprecating way that is both funny and revealing. It’s an adventure log from a manic pixie now in her mid30s. As I listened to “SelfTanner,” I was both riveted and worried that Marnell wouldn’t live to the end of her selfnarrated story.
That worry haunted me: Are audiences aiding an artist’s selfdestruction when we consume the creative fruits of their dangerous living? Should fans have rejected the music of Amy Winehouse, the literature of F. Scott Fitzgerald or the paintings of JeanMichel Basquiat during their hardestliving years to save them from themselves?
It’s complicated. A lot of art and literature is created from hard living, and some “good” art and literature even glamorize it.
When I got Marnell on the phone recently to talk about “SelfTanner,” our conversation was at times ADHDfrantic. She darted from her new obsession with the NBA and her time in San Francisco dancing in a bikini at a Tenderloin steakhouse to her thoughts on Kamala Harris. (“I imagine her mixed with Catherine Tramell,” she says, referring to Sharon Stone’s character in “Basic Instinct.”)
We also talked about some of the livingontheedge art that was influential to both of us.
In “How to Murder Your Life,” Marnell writes about reading Jean Stein’s biography of tragic Warhol actress Edie Sedgwick, while in “SelfTanner” she talks about following troubled rocker Pete Doherty across Europe. Marnell said she was drawn to the glamour and talent of Doherty and Sedgwick, their enfant terribleness and addictions incidental to the art that attracted her.
When I asked about her own hard living, she was candid.
“I never realized I was going to be in a media narrative,” Marnell said. “Once you are, you see that addiction comes to define you.”
But she added, “I’m more than an addict. These people are more than addicts.” Doherty, she points out, is a “true, fabulous rock star,” and Sedgwick’s personalitydriven fame “was everything our culture turned into.”
Marnell, Doherty and Sedgwick, like other artists, are all more than their addictions, and they are also more than the sum of their artistic output that documents their lifestyles. A lot of their work is heavily informed by those exploits, so it can be hard to separate the artist from the art.
I hope Marnell’s new projects, like her inprogress second book and the television adaptation of “How to Murder Your Life,” keep her behaving in a way that’s personally sustainable. And I say that not only as an empathetic human being, but also as someone who selfishly wants to read and listen to more work by Cat Marnell.
Many of these artists’ works still speak louder than their personal foibles.
As I listened to “SelfTanner for the Soul,” I was both riveted and worried that Cat Marnell wouldn’t live to the end of her selfnarrated story.