Contemporary Authors

• How to Murder Your Life Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2017

1. How to murder your life : a memoir LCCN 2016052226 Type of material Book Personal name Marnell, Cat, author. Main title How to murder your life : a memoir / Cat Marnell. Edition First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Simon & Schuster, [2017] Description 375 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781476752273 (hardback) 9781476752396 (paperback) CALL NUMBER HV5805.M3683 A3 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Rolling Stone - http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/cat-marnell-on-drugs-new-memoir-coming-back-after-rehab-w464370

  The Nine Lives of Cat Marnell
  "Float like a bimbo, sting like a bee." Infamous beauty blogger Cat Marnell is back. Amy Lombard for Rolling Stone
  It took three years, two stints in rehab and one heroin overdose to write her memoir – but now the former xoJane writer is back

  By Bryn Lovitt
  February 2, 2017
  The busy corner between Doyers Street and Chatham Square used to be known as the "Bloody Angle" when Chinese gangsters fought each other with hatchets, but it no longer looks dangerous – and neither does the woman leaning up against a wall in a light blue wig. Cat Marnell – the 5-foot-2 party-girl author who, at 34, is re-launching her career for the second time – gives her wig a little flip and sparks a Marlboro Ultra Light. Her face is defined by eyes as big as whiskey barrels. A stranger mistakes her for Lady Gaga. She lets it slide.

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  She has better things to worry about at the moment – namely, the publication of her first memoir, which is out this week. "Writing this book was agony," says Marnel of the long-awaited How to Murder Your Life, which chronicles the Gonzo-style beauty-blogger's brutal rise and fall. Her voice sounds breathy yet serious, like Moon Zappa reading you your birth chart. "I'm so relieved it's finally over," she says.

  In 2013, Simon & Schuster offered Marnell a book deal, handing over half a million dollars to get it on the shelves. It would take her three years, two stints in rehab and an overdose on heroin to finally finish. "I completely shut down and panicked for two years. Like, throwing chairs across the room – it was that unbearable. But if I didn't write it, they were going to sue me."

  Before the book deal, everyone wanted a piece of Cat Marnell, this suddenly famous Internet star who seemed hell-bent on documenting her own self-destruction via Jane Pratt's edgy web-mag xoJane. Pratt, a Nineties alt-publishing mogul who'd launched third-wave feminism into the realm of glossy fashion magazines with Sassy and Jane, was one of Marnell's childhood idols. So when Pratt announced the launch of xoJane for "real women" seeking "real stories," the young writer jumped at the chance to apply for a position described as "unhealthy health editor." It was a job that soon rocketed Marnell to becoming the Internet's most controversial hot mess.

  However, it wasn't always that way for the publishing prodigy, who by the age of 10 was writing letters to Anna Wintour and mocking up magazine layouts in the bedroom of her parent's mansion in Bethesda, Maryland. As she describes in the book, her Dad was a noted adolescent psychologist with a temper, her mother a chic diabetic prone to periods of isolation. With her older sister away at a fix-your-teen type program, the life she describes at the seemingly perfect Marnell residence was hanging by designer threads.

  Managing Editor Emily McCombs, Jane Pratt and Cat Marnell at xoJane in 2011.
  Managing Editor Emily McCombs, Jane Pratt and Cat Marnell at xoJane in 2011. Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/Getty
  "In the beauty world, you could never even suggest a negative," says Marnell, remarking on her tour de force up the ranks at Conde Nast in the early 2000s, where she eventually became a beauty assistant at Glamour and an editor at the now-defunct Lucky. "Jane let me write whatever I want, and that was when I soared. I remember writing in my cover letter to xo, 'If you hire me, I will do beauty like no one has ever done beauty before.'"

  Even today, Marnell's struggle to choose ambition over addiction continues to hold her back. The dilemma rails through the book, and by the end, it's unclear which side wins. She says she's struck a balance these days, best described as 9 p.m. workouts at Barry's Bootcamp aided by "a little nibble of Adderall. I cut out heroin, benzos, PCP, crack – though I will do the occasional bump of coke."

  Most impressively for a self-professed pill-head – one who claimed that by 26, "Addiction won. I didn't want to be an editor in chief of a creative director or a beauty director anymore. I just wanted to go to bed" – Marnell has vowed to follow any and all creative impulses, even if that means glueing mini crosses to her eyelids in the middle of the night or following Pete Doherty around the U.K. for the profile she longs to write. "There's a lot of strategy to what I do," she says, sucking on a cigarette, standing on the sidewalk next to crates of mangoes and lychee. She cracks open a pink can of rosé. "Float like a bimbo, sting like a bee."

  In long, fake pastel hair and a fur coat (faux – she quit fur for New Year's) she might as well slap the phrase on a billboard. "I have great ideas, and that's why people keep me around," she says. In fact, Marnell was slated to return as beauty editor at to xoJane this fall, though the site has now officially folded and become a part of InStyle Magazine.

  So, as of now, Marnell is jobless, though she claims she could make a killing "marketing things that are bad for you. I could make poppers for straight people. Post-felatio mouth wash. A lipstick that is also lube! Why hasn't anyone come up with that already?"

  Cat says she could make a killing "marketing things that are bad for you. A lipstick that is also lube! Why hasn't anyone come up with that already?"
  Marnell's apartment around the corner is a large, white-on-white studio with big, glass windows and a clawfoot tub, full of sparkly pastel treasures – though she insists the good stuff ("A throw pillow embroidered by Bridgette Berlin!") is in storage. She moved in after rehab, and has since made it into "a cozy cocoon." There are stacks of celebrity biographies, from Whitney Houston to Zelda Fitzgerald, Basquiat to Diane Arbus, Anna Nicole Smith to Sharon Tate; hardbound books of photography by Alexander McQueen and Larry Clark; psychology textbooks with names like Everything There is to Know About Your Eating Disorders; vintage issues of international Vogue's, zines by Harmony Korine, books on O.J. Simpson, Helen Gurley Brown, Monica Lewinsky. "I need to send a copy of my book to Monica Lewinsky," she notes, and quickly punches out an email to her publicist.

  She has everything organized by shades of pink and white, from yoga mats to sheepskin rugs and boxes of diet cereal. Underneath a massive Murakami is a copy of Norman Mailer's Marilyn – though she says identifying with Marilyn is about the most basic thing a party girl could do. "If Bella Hadid reads one book this year," posits Marnell, unironically standing in front of a Harry Styles cutout. "I hope it's How to Murder Your Life."

  Marnell's obsession with over-the-top party girls is the coke-rimmed pillar of her life, going back at least as far as the time she practically lobbed herself at Gwen Stefani backstage at a festival in 1995. "Being a teenybopper in the Nineties was pretty dark," she remarks in the beginning of the book ("Kurt was wearing green Converse One Star sneakers in the suicide photos, so I bought green green Converse One Star sneakers"), then dives into her conservative upbringing in a lavish home that bordered the congressional golf course. She recalls in amphetamine-glazed detail how much she worshipped Courtney Love and eventual boss Jane Pratt, trailblazing trendsetters whose grunge-girl aesthetic defined Marnell's love for alternative culture. When her father ripped her posters off the wall and tore up her hand-crafted zines, she writes, she was devastated.

  "I was trying to write a book that was as readable as celebrity gossip," says Marnell. Amy Lombard for Rolling Stone
  From there, How to Murder Your Life moves quickly as the Adderall that fueled it, racing through magazine gigs, promotions, benders, psych wards and rehabs like free-fall. "There aren't any big words in the book," she emphasizes, tapping at a tower of advance copies. "And it's not that I don't know those words. I just don't talk like that. When I went to Hope Rehab in Thailand to write the book, my counselor Simon Mott let me use writing it as part of my recovery. He let me have affirmations like, 'My book is fun to write! My book is fun to read!' I was trying to write a book that was as readable as celebrity gossip."

  Celebrities rule Marnell's perceptions of culture as well as politics. "I think people are going to get obsessively creative under Trump," she says. "Like what happened in the Eighties under Reagan. Symmetry, Instagram, Kardashians – it's over! Money is over. Rich people need to get weird again, like Diana Vreeland used to be. Like, why don't you quilt yourself a coat of white monkey fur and meander around your apartment?"

  Shock-and-awe is indisputably Marnell's forte, testing people's boundaries as means to see what they were. In 2011, she pushed at what was acceptable to share online by publishing brutally deprecating essays like "The Art of Crack-Tractiveness: How to Look and Feel Great on No Sleep" and "Worst Beauty Editor: 'I Snorted a Line of Bath Salts Today in the Office' Edition" that were no doubt influenced by the kind of leopard-print-pill-box-hat excess that seduced her idol, Edie Sedgwick, in the 1970s. "I've been attracted to feathers, beads and fur my whole life."

  But like many addicts, her sickness pushed her over the edge. Just as her dream of becoming a print editor was ripe enough to grab off the proverbial tree, she found herself having to shield her bad habits and subsequent lack of sleep from the higher-ups at Condé Naste. "The darkest parts of my addiction happened when I was working for Condé," she says without blinking a manicured eyelash.

  Her writing works the same way, jumping from deathly serious topics like abusive relationships with stalkers and the bloody, second-term abortion she had at 18 to making fun of Lindsay Lohan for slurring on pain pills or comments like "There's always a beauty moment – even in the mental hospital." Rambling at times, How to Murder Your Life mirrors her many years dosed on speed, for better and for worse. Its dark humor isn't a gag – rather an opportunity for Marnell to revel in the irony. Susan Shapiro, who taught Cat writing at the New School in 2009, remembers her former student's style as always being "honest, deep, dark, edgy and hilarious."

  Cat was willing to use beauty writing as a platform to air the ugly truth about drug use.
  Marnell's voice for the beauty beat was refreshingly candid. Articles like "I'm a Lonely Insecure Mess with Really Good Skin" and "My Life is Mess but I Smell like Vanilla Ice Cream" flipped the script on an industry designed to cover flaws by hurling hers at you in all caps with elongated vowels. Her willingness to use beauty writing as a platform to air the ugly truth about drug use made her into a polarizing internet antihero. Around that time, Marnell's long-winded rant, "On Whitney Houston's Death: Why I'll Never Shut Up About My Drug Use," got hashed out all over the web.

  Sarah Hepola published her reaction to the piece in a 2012 article for the The New York Times Magazine titled "Watching a Spectacular Public Meltdown With Just a Hint of Jealousy." A recovering alcoholic herself, Hepola praised Marnell for speaking about her addiction to pills and opiates, no holds barred. However, she also expressed worry for the young writer, in whom she saw herself. "Cat's piece took us inside the long night of the addict in a way I had not seen other writers do," says Hepola now. "Stories about addiction get told from the safe side of sobriety but that's not most people's experience, and here she was on the edge of a cliff, in her sparkly slip dress and smeared lipstick, daring us not to watch."

  But people kept reading, especially as her posts grew darker. Other journalists began to express concern at what exactly was going on behind the scenes at xoJane. A Jezebel writer blamed the support of Pratt, as well as her exalting public: "It's hard to know what the deal is when we only hear about Cat through her frenetic first-person narratives or through her adoring boss and commenter fan base. Both often seem, well, 'enabling,' which is the exact word Cat used, jokingly or otherwise, to describe Jane's background cackling in this D.I.Y bath salt snorting video."

  "I definitely did some stunt queening," Marnell admits now. "But if you had a star writer, you'd probably enable that shit, too."

  Then, a number of her erratic musings began to look like cries for help: "3 Beauty Products I Must Have When I am Sooo Sick (and Not Even in a Fun Cokehead-y Way)," "No, Psychiatric Nurse, I Did Not Nod Off Into My Fruit Juice: My Mental Hospital Hair Secret For Subtle Punky-Pretty Pink Streaks" and "I Spent Two Weeks in a Mental Institution but Left with Better Hair."

  Marnell describes a dark year after she received the advance from her book. "When I emerged from it, I couldn't even make eye contact with people. I lost my mind, honestly." Amy Lombard for Rolling Stone
  "My career popped off when I was sickest," Cat recalls, changing wigs in her bedroom, standing next to a large, unmade bed. "Like the darkest parts of my addiction and when everybody wanted to interview me were when I fell off the grid... when I finally murdered that part of my life and just let myself go. No job. No tether."
  At the time, she revealed to Page Six in a now-infamous quote that she wasn't interested in the daily grind of a full-time job. Marnell, they wrote, had "parted ways" with xoJane, after refusing to complete rehab. "I couldn't spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night," she told the newspaper, "when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book." (Pratt, in a post, called Cat "a brilliant writer and one of a kind," but admitted that her lifestyle might have gotten in the way of her duties on staff.)

  The outrageous statement and announcement of her forthcoming book drew media attention, though mostly out of morbid fascination. Gossip circulated from sources who seemed to be tracking her inevitable downfall, with headlines like "Cat Marnell's Friends are Nervous That She Now Has $500,000 to Spend on Drugs." Even Hepola expressed worry for Marnell, writing "I'm afraid Cat only thinks we want to see her bleed."

  "Cat has done more to break down stigma, possibly by accident, than she is given credit for," says one friend.
  She bled and bled that following year, telling anyone who would listen – most infamously through her short-lived column for Vice – that she was spending her advance on drugs, determined to hit rock bottom and shatter then and there. In retrospect, she says now, "That year was so dark for me. Some real shit went down in my personal life, and when I emerged from it, I couldn't even make eye contact with people. I lost my mind, honestly."

  Simon Mott, however – Marnell's confidante and counselor at rehab in Thailand – says Cat's ability to open herself up to pain is her greatest strength, both as a writer and a person headed towards recovery. "Cat has done more to break down stigma, possibly by accident, than she is given credit for," Simon says. "Of course she has paid a price for being so open but ultimately she has survived. Surviving addiction is one thing but then to have survived the public arena is another. Cat takes it all in good humor and always forgives those who may have been scared off in her darker times, she takes responsibility for her sins."

  She explains how everyone wants to talk about what happened to her long blonde hair, which she lost shortly after she turned in the final draft of her book. She told New York Magazine that it was the result of a "bad dye job" that left her with chemical burns across her scalp, but the story is still a bit hazy. "I've been told it fell out and I just didn't notice," Marnell says now, looking away into space, touching the sexy pink bob covering where the hair used to be. But just like that, the verbose talker with a knockout memoir is back at it. Marnell, without a beat, jumps into conversation about her surreal drug binges, celebrity gossip ("I know who January Jones' baby daddy is!"), and the latest pharmaceutical jargon, like none of it affects her at all.

  How to Murder Your Life is meant to feel like you freebased the whole thing in one sitting – that's how it brings you in for the inescapable clench, not unlike addiction itself. But she's trying to move on from the past. She repeatedly refers to a tactic she learned in rehab. "Teflon mind," she writes. "Where you imagine your brain being like nonstick cookware: negative thoughts just slide right off." The thing about Teflon, though, is that no matter how hard you try and scrub off what's burned onto the surface, it always leaves a mark.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Marnell

  Cat Marnell
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Cat Marnell
  Marnell at Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York City, October 2012
  Marnell at Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York City, October 2012
  Born Caitlin Elizabeth Marnell
  September 10, 1982 (age 35)
  Washington, D.C.
  Residence New York City, New York
  Nationality American
  Occupation Writer
  Caitlin Elizabeth "Cat" Marnell (born September 10, 1982) is an American writer and socialite based in New York City. She was a beauty editor at Lucky and XoJane, wrote a column for Vice, and has also written for SELF, Nylon, Glamour. She recently finished writing a memoir titled "How To Murder Your Life".

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life
  2 Career
  2.1 Lucky
  2.2 XoJane
  2.3 Vice
  2.4 "How To Murder Your Life"
  3 References
  Early life[edit]
  Marnell was born on September 10, 1982 in Bethesda, Maryland. She was named after Caitlin Thomas. Her mother is a psychotherapist and her father is a psychiatrist, and she was primarily raised by nannies. At 15, Marnell began attending Lawrence Academy in Groton, Massachusetts.[1] She was a strong student academically, but at 17 was expelled for drug use two weeks before graduation – she finished high school in D.C.[where?] Moving to New York, she attended The New School in Greenwich Village to study nonfiction writing.[2]

  Career[edit]
  Lucky[edit]
  While attending The New School, Marnell interned at beauty magazines, eventually earning the title of beauty assistant at Lucky in 2007. She attended rehab in Connecticut for a month, and when she returned she was promoted to associate beauty editor. She worked at Lucky for two and a half years before quitting after failed attempts at sobriety. After overdosing in her apartment and spending two weeks at Bellevue in 2011, she said she "vowed never, ever to lie to a job again: they could take me or leave me with my drug stuff."[3]

  XoJane[edit]
  Shortly after being released, she was hired by Jane Pratt to become beauty and health director of XoJane. Her writing was "shrouded in irreverent yet deeply personal anecdotes" with frequent references to her drug use, hospitalizations, and mental illnesses.[3] She first received widespread attention when she wrote about using emergency contraception as her primary birth control, which spread through Twitter.[4] Her position was controversial – Anna David at The Fix wrote that Marnell "wins applause for her bravery" in speaking openly about drug use, while Hamilton Nolan at Gawker described her as a "dust-smoking suicidal narcissist downtown swinger beauty columnist".[5][6] She had problems writing regularly which frustrated Pratt – in April 2012, the publisher of XoJane ordered Marnell into rehab. In June 2012, she wrote to the New York Post confirming that she had quit, writing in part that she "couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust".[7]

  Vice[edit]
  Just days after her open letter, Marnell was hired by Vice for a column called "Amphetamine Logic". Described as darker than her previous work, it focused around Marnell's drug use and day-to-day life. In November, she went to rehab in Thailand on assignment for Vice but did not write anything.[8] When she returned, she began taking drugs again and wrote final goodbye columns for Vice in September 2012 and January 2013.[9][10] Altogether, she wrote 11 articles in the series.

  "How To Murder Your Life"[edit]
  In March 2013, it was reported by the New York Post she had a deal with Simon & Schuster worth up to half a million dollars.[11] The publishing house confirmed the deal but declined to address the estimated figure. It was reported that Marnell's memoir would chronicle her "sexual and narcotic adventures" and her "drug-fueled rise" through Condé Nast, xoJane, and Vice.[12] "How To Murder Your Life" was released on January 31, 2017 in the United States and became at instant New York Times Bestseller. The New York Times Book review called the memoir a "success".[13]

Cat Marnell's Memoir Provides a Window Into 2000s-Era Doctor Shopping
Science of Us. (Feb. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New York Media
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/
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Byline: Alice Robb

As the nominal beauty editor for the website xoJane, (http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/01/cat-marnell-how-to-murder-your-life.html?mid=full-rss-scienceofus) Cat Marnell earned a loyal following with her dispatches from the glamorous hell of New York nightclubs, drug addiction, and psychiatric instability - disguised as beauty advice. (Representative posts include "(http://www.xojane.com/beauty/i-ll-try-anything-once-kleenex-eating-appetite-suppression) I'LL TRY ANYTHING ONCE: Kleenex Eating for Appetite Suppression!" and "(http://www.xojane.com/beauty/it-happened-me-i-spent-halloween-mental-hospital-plus-candy-corn-nails) I 'Monster Mashed' in the Mental Hospital. Plus, Halloween, Nails!") In her absorbing (http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/01/how-to-murder-your-life-excerpt-from-cat-marnells-memoir.html?mid=full-rss-scienceofus) new memoir, How to Murder Your Life, Marnell gives the full account of her Adderall-fueled ascent through the ranks of Conde Nast beauty departments, where she was rewarded for the "amphetamine work ethic" that helped her tackle tedious tasks -organizing her boss's desk, sorting through heaps of barely distinguishable beauty products -with gusto; her struggles with bulimia, addiction, and self-loathing; her stints in rehab and her professional redemption at xoJane. We hear how she set her hair on fire at a work event, but was too drunk to notice; how she spent her 27th birthday crying at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting; how she stopped sleeping, and fled her own apartment after hallucinating that it was overrun by rats.

One of the most revealing details, though, involves neither burning follicles nor imaginary vermin infestations. The ease with which Marnell duped various unwitting doctors into writing her the same prescriptions is startling to read. Her Adderall habit began in high school, when her father, a psychiatrist - hoping for a positive effect on his daughter's GPA, never mind her brain chemistry - started writing her prescriptions. In New York- where she continued to receive packets of pills from her dad in Maryland - Marnell also started seeing her own psychiatrists, who pulled out their Rx pads after cursory consultations.

"The less I slept, the more emotionally and psychologically disorganized I became," she writes. "But no matter how muddled I was, my doctor-shopping game was always on point." She scheduled consultations for plastic surgery procedures she didn't want, and left with scripts for post-op Vicodin or Percocet. She told one Upper East Side psychiatrist - the "ancient" Dr. M - that her primary doctor had retired, and demanded 80 milligrams per day of Adderall and Ambien. The doctors she visited didn't question her exclusive commitment to them. When it came time to fill her multiple prescriptions, Marnell didn't even get her hands dirty: She would send two different interns to two different pharmacies, a Walgreens and a Duane Reade, near the Conde Nast office in Times Square.

Marnell developed this routine in the mid-2000s - a few years before the abuse of prescription painkillers became a full-blown public-health crisis. Her portrayal of doctor-shopping offers a window into a behavior that helped fuel the epidemic.

"Doctor shopping is absolutely one of the biggest contributors to the opioid epidemic- definitely ten years ago, and even now," says Anita Gupta, an anesthesiologist and adviser to the FDA. The prevalence of doctor shopping is difficult to measure -with its perpetrators and beneficiaries doing their best to avoid detection - but researchers believe it was a major factor in the painkiller abuse we see today.

When researchers in California (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20566252) analyzed the 17-million-plus prescriptions entered into a state database in the year 2007, they found that about 8.4 percent involved more than one provider or more than one pharmacy. The most common classes of drugs obtained through doctor shopping were opioids (like OxyContin and Percocet), followed by benzodiazepines (like Valium and Xanax), stimulants, and diet pills. In a 2012 (http://www.jabfm.org/content/27/5/583) survey at a southeastern university in the U.S., about 4 percent of students admitted that they had at least attempted to doctor shop. "While doctor shopping is a relatively rare behavior - only a fraction of one percent of controlled-substance patients engage in this behavior in most states - it still exists," says Peter Kreiner, a scientist at the Institute for Behavioral Health at Brandeis University. "A fraction of one percent still represents hundreds, or in some states thousands, of people who are at risk for overdose and any number of health problems."

Since the mid-2000s, when Marnell was at large, 49 states have created "Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs" - electronic databases of patients' drug histories, which physicians are supposed to check before writing new prescriptions. (Opponents of the program in Missouri, the only state without some version of it, argue that a searchable compendium of sensitive medical information could pose a risk to patients' privacy.) These efforts appear to be making a dent: In 2013, for instance, the year New York State put its program in place, the number of people filling prescriptions with five or more different doctors (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/us/missouri-alone-in-resisting-prescription-drug-database.html?_r=0) fell by 75 percent.

Brea Perry, a sociologist at Indiana University who has studied opioid abuse, categorizes doctors who write multiple prescriptions into four different groups. "Deficient prescribers" are "unaware of which prescription drugs are controlled substances," and don't know how to recognize symptoms of addiction in their patients. "Duped prescribers" - like Marnell's geriatric "Dr. M" - are "gullible or careless or easy to manipulate." These two groups, she says, are difficult to prosecute: "It's hard to prove any kind of bad intent," and they're not entirely to blame, as "some of this comes from a lack of training." The two other types of prescribers are less sympathetic. "Deliberate prescribers" sell drugs for profit, sometimes out of ersatz pain clinics or "pill mills," and "drug-dependent prescribers," who are addicted to controlled substances themselves, empathize too much with their dependent patients. She estimates that the majority of doctor shopping is clustered around about 10 percent of prescribers. "Most doctors are responsible," she says. "They don't have bad intentions. They're really busy or they don't have the training."

Compared to the mid-2000s, doctor shopping "definitely isn't as frequent," says Gupta, "but it still could happen." Not all doctors, for one thing, use the system the way it's intended. "The ability of people like Cat Marnell to engage in doctor shopping depends a lot on prescribers' checking or not checking their state prescription-drug monitoring program about a patient's or prospective patient's prescription history, before prescribing to them," says Kreiner.

Even if providers do comply with the PDMP regulations, a determined addict can still find loopholes. If a patient went from doctor to doctor on the same day, for instance, they could game the system: "There's a lag time," Gupta explains. "By the time the system picks up the prescription, it could be a day, a week, a month."

And there are, of course, other ways to get around the law. One friend of mine has been using her dog's Xanax prescription for years. "No appointment required and the prescription can be filled at a grocery or CVS for $15," she says. Another, hoping that Adderall could help her out of a post-college slump but lacking an ADHD diagnosis, told me how she looked up the symptoms of ADHD and the number of a local psychiatrist. "I remember saying that I felt like there was a coiled snake in my brain that darted up and ate whatever thoughts I was having as soon as I tried to concentrate - he liked that," she said. "I laughed at all his jokes and walked out with a prescription."

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Alice Robb

Cat Marnell Is Still Alive
The Cut. (Jan. 27, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New York Media
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Byline: Emily Gould

I'm relieved that the weather is unseasonably warm on the day I meet Cat Marnell, because it means I can wear my vintage fake-leopard jacket and not my North Face Brooklyn Mom sleeping-bag coat. From reading her new memoir,(https://www.amazon.com/How-Murder-Your-Life-Memoir/dp/1476752273) How to Murder Your Life, with its Bret Easton Ellis-style litanies of labels, I know that Marnell notices the details of other people's hair and skin and clothing, down to the perfume they're wearing. But as soon as she greets me on the stairs of her apartment building (wearing bleach-stained black leggings that hang loosely on her sticklike legs), I stop worrying what she'll think of me and try to figure out what's going on with her. She's talking quickly, loping around her living room, offering explanations and covering about ten of the topics I've planned to ask about before I can even take off my sensible shoes. She's barefoot, wearing a white headscarf with what look like clip-in extensions hanging down her back, her eyeliner is uneven, and she is still undeniably beautiful.

Marnell's beauty - undiminished by years of disordered eating, cigarettes, and an erratic sleep schedule - is of a particular doll-like kind that somehow brings out the worst in men and women alike. She is tiny, with gaunt limbs, perfect lips, and those giant cartoon eyes. She looks like a cross between Elizabeth Wurtzel and Tara Reid, like a doll you'd be tempted to bend into weird shapes and give a buzz cut.

A housekeeper is leaving just as I arrive, but even though the place is now pristine and smells like cleaning products, there's a lingering sense that a big ongoing mess is just barely being contained. Hundreds of books and magazines, organized by color, frame a spectacular Manhattan Bridge view; the first title that catches my eye is Exploiting Chaos. A curtain of sparkly, probably expensive dresses are hanging off the shower rod in the translucent-paned cubicle bathroom that divides bedroom from living room/kitchen. More gowns dangle from a closet door and line the garment racks that surround the bed. "You know that line in Trainwreck where Amy Schumer gets invited to a gala last minute and jokes she'll find something to wear in her 'gown closet'? I only have a gown closet," Marnell says. It turns out the dresses are waiting to be packed up and put into storage by a media-studies major who's working as her part-time assistant; the goal is to make the contents of the apartment unappealing to a former friend turned stalker who has robbed Marnell before. "I want him to come in here and see only, like, a Hanes sweatshirt," she explains. We walk past a pink shoe rack adorned with a collection of multicolored hospital bracelets and curl up cross-legged on the couch, me with a glass of water I've poured myself from the spotless sink, Marnell with a cup of Dunkin' coffee that she reheats periodically in the microwave.

There's a grubby pink totebag on the sofa between us, and I immediately imagine Marnell reaching into it and scrabbling around for a pill bottle. An hour or so later, when she finally does, neither of us even bothers to mention it. "There's a bottle of Adderall right next to me as I sit writing this. It has always been my 'mostly companion,' as Eloise would say," she writes in her book's afterword. Most addiction memoirs end with the end of the addiction. Cat Marnell, however, remains what she's best known for being: a pillhead, a doctor-shopper, and a beauty expert whose own stunning looks are under constant assault by her lifestyle, which even at its least druggy is basically nonstop self-harm.

In conversation, Marnell's light, gushy voice is similar to the Eloise-y tone that makes her book so companionably charming; her laugh is always on the verge of bubbling out, and light flashes behind her marble-size irises as she speaks. Her daffiness belies a knack for offhand brilliance; even her glancing observations are writerly and insightful: "He's so serious in such an endearing way," "He has the craziest eyes, second to the National Geographic cover lady." It's fucked up to admit, but even though I'd read a lot of her writing, I didn't expect her to be as smart as she is. She works what she calls the "wolf in bimbo's clothing" angle, though it's not entirely clear why a wolf would want to adopt that particular disguise. Part of it might be that she never really had a choice: she was born blonde and pretty to rich, dysfunctional parents. Worse still, one was a psychotherapist and the other a psychiatrist; a teenage Cat's father wrote her first prescription for ADHD medication.

She first rose to prominence, at least in the insular New York media world, around 2011, when she was hired by Jane Pratt to help(http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/cat-marnell-is-back-at-xojane.html?mid=full-rss-thecut) run xoJane. (This was Pratt's ambitious website launch and third headline-grabbing media moment, after Jane and Sassy.) Marnell, who'd resigned from her previous job as an associate beauty editor at Lucky after her meteoric rise there culminated with stints in rehab and a mental hospital, had responded to a tweet from an editor looking for an "unhealthy health writer." She wound up writing a column that reliably generated news, much of it from other websites that questioned her employers' role in enabling her. She also garnered fans who read her to be entertained and also, maybe, reassured that they had their own shit comparatively together. When I told my friends I was interviewing her, they were quick to cite their favorite Marnell posts, but their curiosity about her ("Is she terrible?") was mingled with a kind of guilty concern. "I don't want to look sometimes," a friend who follows her on(https://www.instagram.com/cat_marnell) Instagram told me.

There's always a fine line between appreciating the art that someone's making out of her fucked-up life and feeling like your attention makes you complicit in her self-destruction. With the publication of How to Murder Your Life, Marnell is blurring it more thoroughly than ever. But being open about her drug use has always felt healthier to Marnell than hiding it. In one of her most popular posts,(http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/whitney-houston-dead) about Whitney Houston's death, she pointed out that keeping addiction under wraps is what so often leads women to overdose in private. "No one else in women's magazines or websites is writing about this stuff, so there's nowhere for a female community to read it," she wrote. "You call it oversharing. I call it a life instinct."

From xoJane, Marnell went on to write a column called "Amphetamine Logic" for(https://www.vice.com/en_us/topic/amphetamine-logic) Vice. When(http://nymag.com/thecut/2012/06/cat-marnell-explains-her-split-from-xojanecom.html?mid=full-rss-thecut) she left xoJane, a "Page Six" item(http://pagesix.com/2012/06/14/drugs-more-fun-than-work/) quoted Marnell saying that she would rather smoke angel dust and watch shooting stars on the roof of Le Bain than show up at a job. The item also contained the news that she was working on a book. With the help of a literary agent (one who also represents President Trump), she sold a proposal for what would become How to Murder Your Life for an estimated half a million dollars in 2013. I remember reading that "Page Six" item and smirking: It was and is so crazy to me that anyone would think writing a book was easier than showing up to a job every day! Marnell missed her first book deadline, overdosed on heroin, and spent her whole advance before writing a word. She more than justified the concerns of everyone who thought that book would never be written.

But then Marnell managed to get herself to rehab, at a facility in Thailand helmed by a guru who also treats Pete Doherty. There, she finally started writing without her usual helpers. "Rehab is basically a memoir-writing workshop," she told me. "You have to reiterate your story so many times, you storyboard it out. You basically leave with an outline that you can send to a publisher." Now, despite a recent "drug vacation" (more on that below), she says that she's healthier than ever before. "My survival is not a fluke. I have definitely chosen the better path." The mere fact of the book's existence means that she is capable of putting her ambition ahead of her addiction, at least temporarily. The book is also far from messy - her control of style and tone is impressive, as is her wry self-awareness. Plus, Marnell's story isn't only about Adderall, bulimia, angel dust, and abortions. The familiar party-crash-bottom-out-recover-slip-repeat cycle-of-addiction narrative is there, but just as interesting is the backdrop: a slippery, fascinating moment in the history of media. It's a record of a time that kids growing up post-internet won't really ever understand, before randos with YouTube channels became more influential than any beauty editor.

At the start of Marnell's career, which began with internships at Nylon and Teen Vogue and then a job at Lucky, print magazines were glamorous and Conde Nast was a citadel of power. Then, just as Marnell's drug habit was getting wildly out of control, the economy crashed and the print world began to collapse. For the girl who, at age 7, created two issues of a craft project called "Beauty Queen Magazine," complete with cover lines and advertisements, it was a shattering comedown that she's still not quite over.

Marnell still reveres print, but she was made for the internet. Online, the habits that had once been liabilities became her brand, and she was at the forefront of a brief golden era for a particular kind of online media. It's hard to remember now that what writers like Marnell and I started out doing online - basically, incorporating the ongoing stories of our lives into the content we were required to churn out for work - was once considered shocking; it went so quickly from novel to deliberate outrage-clickbait to de rigueur to played-out. The day before I met with Marnell,(http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/12/jane-pratt-to-leave-time-inc-xojane-folding-into-instyle.html?mid=full-rss-thecut) Time Inc. announced that it was folding the xoJane site, which it had recently acquired, into InStyle's site, and Jane Pratt announced her departure.

Marnell wants to make it clear that she loves Pratt, that the economics of the industry are to blame rather than Pratt herself, and that she thinks former staffers who've rushed to speak ill of the dead are wrong to do so. The love is mutual. "Cat is extremely smart and thoughtful and ambitious and driven and I can put up with a lot to get the quality of work that she can produce," Pratt tells me via email a few days later. "I would be lucky to get to work with her again." As to whether keeping Marnell on staff and giving her a platform (and the health insurance that enabled her to fill her prescriptions) was helping her to harm herself, Jane says, "I worried about whether I was enabling her fairly constantly, particularly toward the end of her time on staff at xoJane when I was more aware of her self-destructive behaviors. By that time, it became an ongoing conversation with the HR department and others at the publishing company as to how to handle it." Incidentally, Pratt notes, this isn't the first time one of her former employees has written a book about the drugs they took on the job: Jane staffer Joshua Lyon first bought Vicodin online for an article and wound up publishing the memoir(https://www.amazon.com/Pill-Head-Secret-Painkiller-Addict/dp/B0048BPEOY) Pill Head in 2010. ("I could definitely stand to learn something from that," Pratt says.)

Marnell is realistic and clear-eyed about the risks and rewards of what's been called the "first-person industrial complex." In our conversation, she outlines solid advice for writers looking to make a living online these days: Do long-form stuff, do original reporting, set boundaries. By being temperamentally ill-suited to hitting deadlines and churning out anodyne copy, Marnell says, she inadvertently kept herself from becoming an SEO slave cranking out 20 posts a day. While readers might have worried about Marnell, she doesn't feel like her bosses ever exploited her; far from it. Instead, she feels bad for them - bad for having lied to them and flaked on them over and over again. She believes in paying your dues, taking unpaid internships, and getting thrillingly reamed out by your powerful bitch-queen editor. "If Anna Wintour ever screamed at me, I'd make it my ringtone!" she says, eyes wide.

So what is Marnell's current dream job? "I would love to be Jane's creative director, but I also don't really want a job at this point." She may or may not need one; though she's vague about what happened after she spent her whole book advance on drugs, she does tell me at some point that her dad is now in control of her money. I think immediately of Britney Spears, then realize there's another thing they have in common: They've both shaved their heads. Or, well, there's something weird going on with Marnell's hair; what's going on under the scarves and wigs she's been wearing lately?

It's hard to get her to speak directly about what happened to her scalp. "I lost all my hair. Well, it might be there, but I'm not allowed to think that. I think it's plastered to my head in a kind of glue that resembles skin. It's so complicated." While working on her book, Marnell had stuck to a regimen: waking up at a normalish hour, Barry's Bootcamp, prepackaged cut veggies and half-sandwiches from Starbucks and 7/11, Adderall just to focus and not to get high, a few drinks with friends, and maybe a little coke, "but not, like, lines of it, everybody just gives me bumps," and then no sleep aids except Ambien and nonnarcotic antidepressant Trazodone. After turning in her final draft, she retreated for a month to her mother's house in Takoma Park, Maryland, where decided to reward herself for her years of abstemiousness by taking enough Adderall to get high, then higher, and then she really lost the thread. She tried one product after another to correct a bad dye job, then tweakily left something or other on too long and ended up with what sounds like a combination of chemical burns and scar tissue. When she tried to unknot what hair had grown back, using a meat thermometer, blood shot out of her head onto her mom's kitchen counter. She showed me a laundry basket full of what she calls "cosplay wigs" in cotton-candy colors. "I have everything now, except hair. And a man."

When she says that, I wonder aloud why she would want one. In her book, she describes romantic involvements that range from druggily codependent to horrifically abusive, starting in high school with a boyfriend who got her pregnant and then left her for a close friend. The most harrowing sequence in the book is about a sometime hookup who would use Marnell's apartment as a crash pad when he was in town, and occasionally use her body as something akin to a wad of toilet paper. She got pregnant from that encounter, too.

Still, she says, she wants a boyfriend. She claims that she dreams of having a husband, a baby, a reliably boring day-to-day, but for someone who "misses every flight" and seems to use her fancy stove solely to light cigarettes, the mandatory routines of domesticity seem like they might be a ways off. In the more immediate future she also wants to travel the world, now that she's done with her book, but that also poses some logistical challenges. "You think, Wait, how do I get my stuff every month? And that grounds me -" She makes a noise of deflating, falling back to Earth. "Like, I can't. I have to figure that shit out." When I commend her on avoiding the standardized addiction-and-recovery story arc, she shrugs off the compliment. "That's what everyone says, but I'd so much rather have that story arc."

But in a way she does, at least for now. She's back to her routine of Barry's Bootcamp and waking up during daylight hours, dedicating herself to promoting her book and beginning work on the next one. For some people, semi-sobriety can work for years - I think of Courtney Love, who makes a memorable cameo in Marnell's book. If you have the resources to hit bottom and then detox in a nice place every few years, why not keep doing what you do for as long as you can?

As we talk, night falls outside and Marnell's face starts to make more sense, somehow; the unevenness of her eyeliner and other tiny flaws become invisible, and her fake hair gleams in the neon reflected through her windows. She's started bouncing around her living room as we talk, itching to get outside, so we go for a walk in the warren of tiny streets that surround her building. She lopes down the crowded sidewalks like she owns them, talking a mile a minute about her neighborhood and the friends we have in common. Later she's going to a club that her friend is opening underneath the Williamsburg Bridge, and I'm invited, if I want to go. For a minute, I think I do want to; the outsize energy that fills her tiny body has given me a contact high in the hours we've spent together. This, rubbernecking aside, is why reading Marnell is so much fun: When she's sparkling, high and pretty, it seems so thrilling to be her. "This is when I feel most like myself, walking around for hours, looking at the sky," she tells me as we stroll, and I remember a time when I felt that way too - when(https://www.amazon.com/Hex-Education-Emily-Gould/dp/1595141189/) my first book was coming out, and I still thought that the purpose of my life was to accumulate material. Certainly, Marnell has accumulated some great material; I hope she'll be able to keep getting it down on paper. We hug good-bye, and she feels like a small pile of knobs in my arms. Then I turn around and head for the subway back to Brooklyn, an early dinner, and a reasonable bedtime.

Hair and makeup by Mahfud Ibrahim for Exclusive Artists Management using CHANEL Rouge Coco Gloss and Hot Tools.

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Emily Gould

How to Murder Your Life
The Cut. (Jan. 27, 2017):
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Byline: Cat Marnell

A baby seal walked into a club. Just kidding! The baby seal was me. And fine, I didn't walk into a club, per se - not on that night, anyway. It was the VIP tent of Cirque du Soleil - you know, the famous French Canadian circus show? They'd set up a big, white tent - it sort of looked like a peaky marshmallow - called the Grand Chapiteau on Randall's Island, which was up on the East River just off Manhattan. Earlier that evening, I'd been picked up at the Conde Nast building in midtown and chauffeured there. For "work."

It was the summer of 2009, and I was walking with a bit of a limp because I had broken glass in my foot from - well, I wasn't sure what from, exactly. I think I broke a bottle of Kiehl's Musk on my bathroom floor and then I stepped on it, I guess, and I never wound up getting the shards taken out.

"You need to go see a doctor," my boss - legendary beauty director Jean Godfrey-June - said every day when I hobbled into her office in ballerina flats. "Today."

"I will," I'd promise. But then I'd just go home, pound Froot Loops in a dark trance, or get high with my friend Marco.

Yep! I was twenty-six years old and an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America, and that's all that most people knew about me. But beneath the surface, I was full of secrets: I was an addict, for one. A pillhead! I was also an alcoholic-in-training who drank warm Veuve Clicquot after work, alone in my boss's office with the door closed; a conniving uptown doctor shopper who haunted twenty-four-hour pharmacies while my coworkers were at home watching True Blood in bed with their boyfriends; a salami-and- provolone-puking bulimic who spent a hundred dollars a day on binge foods when things got bad (and they got bad often); a weepy, wobbly hallucination-prone insomniac who jumped six feet in the air a la LeBron James and gobbled Valium every time a floorboard squeaked in her apartment; a tweaky self-mutilator who sat in front of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, digging gory abscesses into her bikini line with Tweezerman Satin Edge Needle Nose Tweezers; a slutty and self-loathing downtown party girl fellatrix rushing to ruin; and - perhaps most of all - a lonely weirdo who felt like she was underwater all of the time. My brains were so scrambled you could've ordered them for brunch at Sarabeth's; I let art-world guys choke me out during unprotected sex; I only had one friend, a Dash Snow - wannabe named Marco who tried to stick syringes in my neck and once slurped from my nostrils when I got a cocaine nosebleed; my roommate, Nev "Catfish" Schulman, wanted me out of our East Village two-bedroom; my parents weren't talking to me ever since I'd stuck my dad with a thirty-thousand-dollar rehab bill. I took baths every morning because I was too weak to stand in the shower; I wrote rent checks in highlighter; I had three prescribing psychiatrists and zero ob-gyns or dentists; I kept such insane hours that I never knew whether to put on day cream or night cream; and I never, ever called my grandma.

I was also a liar. My boss - I was her assistant at the time - had been incredibly supportive and given me six weeks off to go to rehab. I'd been telling Jean that I was clean ever since I got back, even though I wasn't. And then she promoted me.

So now I was a beauty editor. In some ways, I looked the part of Conde Nast hotshot - or at least I tried to. I wore fab Dior slap bracelets and yellow plastic Marni dresses, and I carried a three-thousand-dollar black patent leather Lanvin tote that Jean had plunked down on my desk one afternoon. ("This is - too shiny for me," she'd explained.) My highlights were by Marie Robinson at Sally Hershberger Salon in the Meatpacking District; I had a chic lavender pedicure - Versace Heat Nail Lacquer V2008 - and I smelled obscure and expensive, like Susanne Lang Midnight Orchid and Colette Black Musk Oil.

But look closer. I was five-four and ninety-seven pounds. The aforementioned Lanvin tote was full of orange plastic bottles from Rite Aid; if you looked at my hands digging for them, you'd see that my fingernails were dirty, and that the knuckle on my right hand was split from scraping against my front teeth. My chin was broken out from the vomiting. My self-tanner was uneven because I always applied it when I was strung out and exhausted - to conceal the exhaustion, you see - and my skin underneath the faux-glow was full-on Corpse Bride. A stylist had snipped out golf-ball-size knots that had formed at the back of my neck when I was blotto on tranquilizers for months and stopped combing my hair. My under-eye bags were big enough to send down the runway at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: I hadn't slept in days. I hadn't slept for more than a few hours at a time in months. And I hadn't slept without pills in years. So even though I wrote articles about how to take care of yourself - your hair, your skin, your nails - I was falling apart.

I'd never been in the VIP section of a circus tent before. There was an open bar and colossal flower arrangements, and waiters in black tie swishing around with trays of mini cheeseburgers and all that. Maybe little shotties of vichyssoise. You know how it is! Anyway, I was at the fucking Cirque du Soleil not by choice, but as the guest of a major "personal care" brand - one of Lucky's biggest advertisers. As associate beauty editor, it was my job to represent the magazine at get-togethers like these: to rub elbows and be pleasant and professional. Seriously, it was the easiest gig in the world! And yet it wasn't always so easy for me.

"I'll take one of those." I stopped a dude with a tray of champagne.

"Thanks, honey."

"Hi, Cat!" a beauty publicist with a clipboard said. "Thanks so much for coming!"

"Good to see you," I lied. Thunder clapped outside.

"The gang's over there," she said.

The publicist was referring to the usual group of beauty editors - my colleagues. They were from every title you've ever heard of: Teen Vogue, Glamour, Elle, Vogue, W, Harper's Bazaar, InStyle, O, Shape, Self. I attended events alongside them every day, and yet I never felt like I belonged. I'd spent years trying to get into their world: interning, studying mastheads, interviewing all over town. But now that I was one of them, I felt defective - self-conscious and out of place in the dreamy career I'd worked so hard for, and unable to connect with these chic women I'd idolized. I could barely make small talk with them! It probably didn't help that I was always strung out on Adderall, an amphetamine pill prescribed for the treatment of attention deficit disorder. (How much Adderall was I always strung out on, you ask? Lots of Adderall. Enough Adderall to furnish four hundred Damien Hirst Pharmacy installations! Enough Adderall to suppress all the appetites of all the starving children in all the world! Enough - well, you get the idea.)

I set down my empty glass and approached "the gang" with the same vague dread I always felt. A few women nodded hello.

"How are things at Good Housekeeping?" I asked an editor with a Hitchcock-blond bob.

"Cosmo," she corrected politely.

"Champagne?" It was the same waiter.

"No thanks," Cosmo Editor said.

"Sure!" As I helped myself, a woman standing with her back to me turned around. It was the person I'd dreaded seeing all night: the Vice President of Marketing for this (major - major) beauty brand. Oh, no. Now my bosses at Lucky had essentially sent me here tonight to kiss up to this powerful, advertising-budget-controlling woman - the Vice President of Marketing, who not only detested me, but had recently seen me on drugs and in my underwear. It all went down on a weekend press trip to the Mayflower Spa in Connecticut, one of the most luxurious retreats on the East Coast. Other beauty editors and I were there for two nights as a guest of Vice President of Marketing and the beauty brand. The first night, there was a fancy dinner. I ate nothing. Then I wobbled back to my deluxe cottage, stripped off my clothes, popped a Xannie bar, boosted it with a strawberry-flavored clonazepam wafer I'd found stuck to a tobacco flake-covered Scooby-Doo fruit snack at the bottom of my grimy Balenciaga, and blacked out on top of the antique four-poster feather-top bed.

When I woke up, sunlight was streaming through the windows in my suite. There was a lipstick-smeared drool stain on the Frette linens. And someone was - shouting. Wait, what? I turned my heavy head.

The Vice President of Marketing was in my room - yelling at me!

"AHHHHH!" I was nearly naked! I fumbled for the duvet.

"You missed breakfast!" The Vice President of Marketing was bugging. Behind her was a male hotel employee with a key card. "We've been calling and calling!"

"I overslept!" I cried. "Why are you in my room? Can you give me some fucking privacy? You can't just bust in on people!" I knew I shouldn't talk to one of Lucky's biggest advertisers this way, but I was pissed. I may have been a drug addict, but I had my dignity! You know?

"Be at the spa in fifteen minutes!" the Vice President of Marketing shrieked. Then she stormed out. The hotel employee scurried after her. I sat there in my benzo-fog. Had that really happened?

The rest of the weekend was awkward, to say the goddamn least. The Vice President of Marketing glowered at me the whole time. I'd never been so happy to leave a spa.

It was the worst press trip ever! But, of course, I couldn't tell my boss that.

"How was the Mayflower?" Jean had asked first thing on Monday.

"Fantastic," I'd lied - too well, maybe. Because a month later, I was assigned another event with the beauty brand. And here I was - the Vice President of Marketing's guest, again - representing Lucky beauty at the Cirque du Soleil.

"Nice to see you." I grimaced. The Vice President of Marketing nodded stiffly, then turned away. My favorite waiter passed.

"I'll take one more," I said, taking two champagne flutes. Glug-glug-glug.

And then - showtime! Our group took up half of the first two rows. I was sandwiched between two other beauty editors.

Uuuuuurrrrrgghhhhhhhhhh, I thought as the house lights went down. I slid my Ray-Bans off the top of my head to cover my eyes.

You know what happened next. Clowns dressed like wiggers - am I allowed to say "wiggers"? - jumped out of a big box, wearing their wide pants! Or something like that.

Thirty minutes later, I was still sitting there chomping on Juicy Fruit and worrying that my self-tanner was making me smell like Ritz Crackers, when . . .

"HIC!"

It was the loudest hiccup I'd ever hiccupped, and I am a loud hiccupper.

"Oof!" a clown grunted onstage as he pushed a ball around. Otherwise, it was quiet in the theater.

"HIC!" I had downed that champagne way too fast.

"Oof."

"HIC!"

The editor next to me shifted in her seat.

"Oof."

"HIC!"

Finally, I could take no more.

"Excuse me," I whispered to the Cosmo editor. Wow, I was drunk.

"HIC!" I squished - "HIC!" - past the beauty editor from Harper's Bazaar. "HIC!" I squished past Vogue. Everyone - "HIC!" - got a lap dance for free, like in the N.E.R.D. song. "HIC!"

Finally, I was in the aisle. I turned to head up the steps and-

"AUGGGH!" I cried. WHAM! I hit the ground hard.

The audience gasped.

Oh. My. God.

"HIC!"

I scrambled out of the dark theater - into the VIP tent, where the waiters were prepping for intermission. I staggered up to the bar like I had a gunshot wound and ordered two glasses of champs. If there was ever a time for double fisting, it was now.

Unbelievable, right? You'll never believe what happened next.

At intermission, the VIP tent filled with people. About five minutes later, my hiccups went away. I was preparing to return to my seat for the second act when a man in a suit approached me.

"Ma'am," he said. He was speaking in a low voice. "I'm afraid I am going to have to ask you to leave."

I didn't think I'd heard him right.

"Excuse me?" I said.

"You're going to have to leave," he repeated.

"Who are you?" I said.

"I work for Cirque du Soleil." The man took my elbow. I jerked it away. "I'm going to escort you to your car."

"You're kicking me out of the circus?" I said.

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "I've been ordered to escort you out."

"But - but why?" I stammered.

He wouldn't answer.

"Ma'am-"

"I'm here with [beauty brand]!" He had to be mistaken. "They're corporate sponsors! They bought the entire first two rows!"

"Please, ma'am." The guy looked embarrassed. "I have to escort you out."

"Is this because I tripped?" I said. I was so confused. "I couldn't see the stairs!"

"Ma'am." He had me by the elbow again! So I jerked it away again. "Your car is out front."

"How do you know that?" I said. How did he know that? He took me by both elbows and led me through the crowd. People were staring. "Who told you to make me leave?" I looked around wildly. That's when I caught the Vice President of Marketing's eye: she was glaring at me. Aha.

Finally, we reached the door. "Will you get off me?" I wriggled out of the guy's grasp. I clomped out of the Grand Chapiteau. It was pouring rain. Sure enough, there it was: the same car the beauty brand had sent to pick me up at Conde Nast earlier that evening. My name was still in the window and everything. (How very thoughtful of the Vice President of Marketing to call it for me.) I ran twenty yards in heels on a muddy gravel path through the downpour. What did I care if I fell again?

"Where to?" my driver said as I slipped into the backseat.

"East Sixth Street," I said. "Between Avenues B and C."

We pulled away, and I took another Adderall to sober up. I looked out the window at the rain. The pill was caught in my throat; I kept swallowing and swallowing, but I couldn't get it down.

At my door, I took off my heels to climb the five flights of stairs to the apartment I shared with Ol' "Catfish" Nev. I unlocked the door, crept through the living room full of Nev's beautiful midcentury modern furniture, and went into my bedroom. My own decor was "midcentury meth lab," let's put it that way. The walls were papered practically to the ceiling with fashion magazine tear sheets - "collaging" was my favorite thing to do when I was geeked up - and makeup (so, so much makeup) was everywhere. The ceramic box on my desk was full of glass stems, Q-tips, my glassine dope baggie collection; my bed was covered in Sharpies and nude Clarins lip liners and wafts of blond clip-in hair, plus books - Norman Mailer's Marilyn Monroe biography and Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel - and feather coats and Tsubi jeans. I hardly ever slept there. When I did, I just pushed everything over.

Tonight I thought I'd rest. I lit a candle for ambience, then I took stuff from the mattress and threw it to the floor until I found them: two pill bottles, tucked under a pillow. My Xanax, and my Ambien. I took one of each. Then I went to the window to light a Parliament. The rain had stopped, and Alphabet City looked pretty, shiny and wet. I tried to feel at peace, but it was impossible. I kept flashing back to the Cirque du Soleil tent - the falling down, the beauty editors turning to look at me, the angry and pointed stare of the Vice President of Marketing, the grip of the man pushing me through the crowd to the car. What was I going to tell Jean? What were other beauty editors going to tell Jean? She knew them all.

Suddenly, I needed to lie down very badly.

I stubbed out my cigarette into a seashell, closed the window, and got in bed. I rubbed some Pure Fiji coconut lotion onto my stomach, closed my smoky eyes, and waited for the curtain to fall. I hated this part. I tried to focus on my breath, just like I'd learned in rehab: inhale, exhale.

But I couldn't quiet my mind. Goddammit, Cat. What was wrong with me, anyway? I had more issues than Vogue. And things weren't getting better as I grew older. They just kept getting worse.

Inhale, exhale.

Fuck this. I sat up and took half a Roxicet I had on the bedside table.

Then I closed my eyes again. Time for some visualization exercises.

I imagined a white tiger leading me through a black jungle to a black river that would carry me away from my problems - away from the Grand Chapiteau, away from the Vice President of Marketing, away from the beauty editor gang. The black river carried me through the black jungle to the end of the island, then it dumped me out into a vast black ocean. But there were no sharks under the surface; it was just me. I was floating on my back and looking up at the black sky.

Inhale, exhale.

When the heaviness finally came it felt so nice - like the lead X-ray smock they drape over you at the dentist. I forgot all about the Red Flower candle burning on the dresser. Black waves were crashing on my bed. I slipped beneath the turbulent surface of the water. It felt so good that I wanted to sink forever. Mmm. My eyes rolled back, my body relaxed, and I passed out to the Britney Spears Blackout album always looping in my head.

Excerpted from (https://www.amazon.com/How-Murder-Your-Life-Memoir/dp/1476752273) How to Murder Your Life, by Cat Marnell. To be published January 31 by Simon & Schuster. Copyright 2017 by Cat Marnell.

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Cat Marnell

How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly. 264.1 (Jan. 2, 2017): p51.
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How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir

Cat Marnell. Simon & Schuster, $29.99 (384p) ISBN 978-1-4767-5227-3

Marnell, a former beauty editor at Lucky magazine, devoted several decades and many tens of thousands of dollars to living a double life, captured in forensic detail in this "amphetamine memoir." As a beauty intern, writer and later editor for Nylon, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky, Marnell inhabited a rarefied, high-heeled, and high-fashion world, but while doing so she was constantly high. Beneath her eating-disorder-thin figure beat the heart of a true addict. Hers is a New York crash and-burn story, a slow-motion train wreck rescued from mere voyeurism by Marnell's wit, impressive memory for people and vivid scenes, devastating honesty, and true gift with words. In the high-rise towers of Manhattan publishing, Marnell attends meetings on topics such as "blonzer" (a beauty marriage between bronzer and blush); in the course of her work she meets her idol Courtney Love; but in her spare time she's doctor-shopping, scoring any substance she can, and engaging in days-long benders that are exhausting and horrific simply to read about. Eventually, her memoir explains how a privileged, highly educated woman from a respectable family dug her way out from under the sheer volume of pills, coke, heroin, dangerous joyless sex, insecurity, depression, addiction, and next-level self-loathing exhaustively recorded here. (Jan.)

How to Murder Your Life
Annie Bostrom
Booklist. 113.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2017): p28.
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How to Murder Your Life. By Cat Marnell. Jan. 2017. 384p. Simon & Schuster, $26.99 (9781501159961). 818.

When Marnell discovered that a prescription drug could control her then-undiagnosed ADHD, academic probation, at her tony Massachusetts boarding school, was behind her. Marnell had imagined working for a magazine since she was a kid. Some bumps in the post--high school road later, one internship in publishing led to another until Marnell was hired full-time at Lucky, as assistant to a beauty editor she idolized. She kept her drug use, now way beyond just prescriptions, private and got promotions. After stints in rehab, she was hired at xojane. com, then VICE magazine, where she began to write openly about using, and her readers loved it. Though there is some healing, this isn't a recovery memoir. And it's much more than a manual for how to screw up one's life, or an encyclopedia of prescriptions, street drugs, and their glam nicknames (though it is both of these things). Marnell is a talented writer who's made a successful career centered on her passion. She writes emphatically and outrageously about things some would prefer to think don't exist, and that's pretty great.--Annie Bostrom

Marnell, Cat: HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE
Kirkus Reviews. (Dec. 15, 2016):
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Marnell, Cat HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 2, 1 ISBN: 978-1-4767-5227-3

A memoir of addiction and the millennial high life. The short answer to the instruction implied in the title is this: do a lot of drugs, drink to excess, be flaky and unreliable on the job, and take stupid risks. A one-time junior fashionista--"I always wanted to be a beauty editor. To me, being a beauty editor was better than being president of the United States!"--Marnell checks off these obligations dutifully, having been trained by a childhood of privilege and bewildered, clueless parents ("My mom was in there--snooping!"). From the manicured suburbs to trendiest Manhattan is but a short step, with an infinitely more interesting medicine cabinet than the usual Ritalin regime. Landing a gig at, yes, a fashion magazine, Marnell soon developed an "amphetamine work ethic" and learned the ropes of the trade, including how to land Vicodin and Percocet and hide her habit effectively--at least at work ("I kept the orange bottles in the zipper pocket of my mom's Chloe Silverado bag--hidden away"). Naturally, the author also learned that the people who surrounded her chemical life were not the most dependable or nicest, four to a couch and doped to the gills ("ZZZZZZZ, one of the dudes snored. At least that meant he was alive"). Writing in her early 30s on the other side of it all, Marnell ends her account with the expected truisms ("Strong, healthy people just don't interest the sickos of the world as much") and Scarlett O'Hara-isms ("Someday I'll find a man who treats me right"). It's all delivered with studied earnestness and an eye to shock value, though there's not much left that can shock us in this sad world: not Japanese pornography and not the louche vision of addicts with Jean Paul Gaultier gym bags. What's missing is humor. Every generation needs its Carrie Fisher, perhaps even its Hunter S. Thompson, but this isn't it.

Cat Marnell lost her job and almost overdosed on heroin - then, she wrote a memoir
Julia Carpenter
The Washington Post. (Feb. 17, 2017): News:
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Byline: Julia Carpenter

Cat Marnell's memoir opens with a joke about clubs and baby seals. Then she details a sordid experience at a Cirque du Soleil work event, where she shows up drunk and incoherent. Then she embarrasses herself in front of a fancy CondA[c] Nast VIP. Then she's kicked out of the party, just six months after she left the same rehab center where Edie Sedgwick spent time.

And that's all just Chapter 1.

As the former magazine beauty editor writes in "How to Murder Your Life," drug addiction is "a chemical barrier between myself and other people." As a writer for Vice, xoJane.com and Lucky magazines, Marnell made a name for herself as a pill-guzzling, angel-dust-huffing disaster ("disaster" is her own word, actually). And that's because Marnell has made a career on, well, being a disaster. Or, more accurately, on being an addict, a descent she details with bracing honesty in her new book.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Marnell talked about writing with exclamation points, battling her decade-long addiction and her journey to recovery (and then back into addiction). This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

- On the privilege of certain kinds of addiction

Addiction is a monster that drags you inside a cave. So with addiction and privilege, you can have more people on the outside of the cave, with more resources to get you out. But if the monster has still got you, there's not much you can do.

- On calling herself a "pill head" or "dope fiend"

You know, I really ran out of words for it.

- On the double life of her addiction

I kept it all such a secret for so long. It is true, when I told the truth about who I was and came clean and stopped hiding it, my career took off.

People were like, "How'd she keep her job?" and the first thing is, I didn't. I eventually lost it. But at first, (Marnell's bosses at the time) really liked me. They thought it was a mental health thing. I was so ambitious.

But I still believe that I wrote very honestly about addiction, to the point that almost all my Amazon reviews are like, "Depressing." Well, yeah, dude, what am I supposed to do? Those were full-blown psychotic breaks I was having. You want me to write about all the fun I had? I could do that, but I didn't want to, because that is wrong, and I did write this book for young people.

- On still using

When you "manage" an addiction, I do believe you can do it on a substance like Adderall. Not so much with heroin, crack, cocaine, but you can when you're on a prescription drug that is a stimulant. I've cut down on everything, but it's really a much, much more difficult way to live. You're not either in the gutter or in recovery, but people are doing everything irresponsibly, or their energy is inconsistent or they're not as connected to other human beings. And a lot of people are doing this.

And that was the idea behind the title "How to Murder Your Life," as well. You're not killing yourself and ODing on heroin. But you are self-sabotaging like every day, just a little bit. You're putting pills in your body that take you away from all your natural cues, like sleeping and requiring intimacy.

People should be lonely when they're alone. I was taking a pill that made me not lonely. It made me not hungry, too. Then I would take sleeping pills when I needed to sleep. And it would make me not tired. So that sounds like so awesome.

But those are the things that God made us with so we could find other people and procreate and be healthy and bear children with our healthy bodies and love each other. They're the most important things about being a human. And prescription drugs will take them away from you, like, "Oh, that's nothing. Look how quickly! Poof! You don't need intimacy! You don't need sleep! You don't need food!" And the days and months turn into weeks and years, and all of a sudden you're murdering your life, and you're hallucinating rats, and "I'm about to lose my job and I'm 27."

I just wanted it to be an addiction memoir. Not all (stories like this) end in death or recovery. They're ongoing, they're progressive diseases.

- On her notoriously distinctive writing voice

Look, we can't all be Joan Didion. I grew up a teeny-bopper, and I'll always be a teeny-bopper. I'm an ADHD kid, and I'm hyper, and I write with a lot of caps and exclamation points. And I was told by my agent in the beginning of the process that exclamation points aren't for books. But you know, I rebel against anything anyone tells me, especially (if the person saying it is) a guy. And my agent is a hetero man.

But here's the thing, when you're sitting with this text for so long, you're always in a bad mood. Writing the book was so horrible for me, so I was writing the book in a bad mood all the time.

The literary device in my head was "bimbo glow." I knew I was going to be annoying. But I was thinking of the narrators I like most in this world, like Cher from "Clueless." Once I let go of what I thought a book should be, that's when I found this voice that was grounded in pop music. I love pop music. I love Britney Spears albums.

The two biggest influences in my life are magazines and addiction treatment. Those are the two main forces I've had looping in my brain, that have shown me how the world works.

- On the title of her book ("How to Murder Your Life") and the dedication ("To all the party girls")

The title I always knew. There's a skateboard company called F---ing Awesome, and they're very cool. They're much cooler than I could ever be. This guy Jason Dill is really cool in this whole graffiti writer world. But those T-shirts I saw years and years ago when I was first working at Lucky - they said "How to Murder Your Life." I was just about to quit my job because of drugs when I first saw this, and I thought, "If I ever had a book, that's what I'm going to call it."

I did write this book for the kind of people who know exactly who they are in this world. I wrote it for younger women, really. And gay guys. And most of the people - I get a ton of emails every day over the past couple of years, from 20-year-old girls all on Adderall and young gay guys. And I think it's hard.

There's also a joke because when I went to rehab I'd be like "I'm a party girl!" and they're like, "No, you're a drug addict." So I almost put "party girls" in quotes in the dedication.

'I Would Never Go Back'
Penelope Green
The New York Times. (Feb. 5, 2017): Lifestyle: p2(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
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Cat Marnell, once a young beauty editor at the now-closed Lucky magazine, is known for her drug use and for writing about her drug use -- at first for xoJane, the online magazine headed by Jane Pratt, and when she flamed out there, at Vice, in a short-lived column called ''Amphetamine Logic.'' Her devoted and horrified readers thrilled to the descriptions of her benders -- on heroin, PCP, crack cocaine, regular cocaine, Adderall and alcohol, among a medley of other narcotics and stimulants -- delivered in a volley of capital letters and exclamation points, and larded with the names of beauty products, fashion brands and celebrities. Her arch prose style recalled the anomie of ''The Andy Warhol Diaries,'' the deadpan exposition of ''American Psycho'' and the girl-speak pioneered by the staff of Sassy, the teenage magazine edited by Ms. Pratt that was published from 1988 to 1996.

Ms. Marnell turned the tropes of women's magazine writing upside down, with stories like ''The Art of Crack-tractiveness: How to Look and Feel Hot on No Sleep,'' which offered tips like ''Brush your teeth!'' along with a how-to guide to real beauty products for fellow partyers who might, like Ms. Marnell, have spent the night in a warehouse, as she wrote, with a ''bunch of U.K. dustheads for five straight hours.''

It was irresistible, and also appalling, and the internet tied itself up in knots debating Ms. Marnell's honesty, talent, authenticity and narcissism, along with the exploitative and enabling behavior of her many bosses. Naturally, she got a book deal and a half-million dollar advance from Simon & Schuster. That she was able to produce her addiction memoir, ''How to Murder Your Life,'' out this week, is a startling feat, given her history of cycling through rehab and psych wards, and her continued prescription drug use. The book is as compelling -- and as problematic -- as her magazine writing: vivid, maddening, heartbreaking, very funny, chaotic and repetitive, as benders are.

On a recent Tuesday, Ms. Marnell, now 34, welcomed me into her Chinatown apartment, a one-bedroom overlooking the on-ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. The place, which she rented a year and a half ago, was decorated with stacks of addiction memoirs; a sheepskin rug upon which was laid a strand of blue Christmas lights aglow; a gray wool sofa; a few framed Takashi Murakami prints; and a poster of Harry Styles of the pop boy band One Direction.

Birdlike and delicate-looking, Ms. Marnell wore bell-bottom jeans, a pink tank top and a waist-length wig in candy colors, one of a sizable collection she has amassed since her hair fell out a few years ago, she isn't quite sure why. She ordered three cups of coffee from a nearby deli, smoked a Marlboro Light very quickly, blowing the smoke out of the sliding glass windows that open to a fire escape, and then poured herself a glass of white wine.

The following interview has been edited and condensed.

I've just finished reading your book, which is harrowing, so I'm a little shaken.

Dude, that was four years ago. I have everything now but hair, though I'm not in recovery and I'm not clean. People are like, ''Is it so brave to tell everything?'' I'm like, ''No.'' For me, being brave would be being in a program and getting clean, instead of ''I found a way to talk about my problems ad nauseam and somehow get paid for it.'' Not that I want to reduce what I've accomplished. I want to say good things.

One idea about addiction is that it's a way to impose structure on a chaotic world. Ann Marlowe's memoir of her heroin addiction, ''How to Stop Time: Heroin From A to Z,'' out in 2000, is a compelling example. And you still take Adderall and Ambien, right?

Yes. That's really true. People think of addicts as being out of control, and they really are. But I'm also a control freak. I want to control everything with a pill, from my appetite to sleeping.

Do you feel you've been exploited by the magazines you worked for?

No. Addicts exploit people. I exploited every opportunity. I have my whole life. The thing about addiction, everyone is asking, Don't you think addiction books are tired? But I think addiction is as human an experience as anything, like heartbreak. It's like any relationship, a marriage, a divorce, it's a relationship and it's human. I wrote this book really for younger people, for the girl I used to be.

Your father, a psychiatrist, prescribed you Ritalin when you were a teenager.

It's so complicated. The thing is, the A.D.H.D. drugs did help. If you had seen my grades, failing school -- failing! -- and the only thing I had to do was take a pill? That shows the deficit.

If my father had been a gun owner, he wouldn't have thought twice about having a gun in his office, and I wouldn't have touched it or done anything violent. But in the same way, as a doctor, he didn't think twice about having samples of Zoloft in his home office. And at 12 years old I did steal samples of antidepressants and bring them to school and take them in front of my friends because I wanted to be cool. I think I am hard-wired for addiction. My father is a good man, and a good dad, and so ethical and I manipulated him for years. But this is the problem. Parents are putting their children on drugs, but they don't think of them as drugs. They think of them as medication.

You were good at magazines, even when you were a little girl, making zines up in your bedroom. You write that you always wanted to be a beauty editor.

Conde Nast editors were like movie stars to me. When I got to Lucky and saw them in the halls, I wanted to huff Anna Wintour. I would stare at Grace Coddington and her fruity red hair. I wanted to be like them so badly, and I did everything I could to fit in. I want my ashes sprinkled in the Conde Nast library. I have a whole collection of magazines in storage. Italian Vogues. Lucky was on the same floor as the international editions, and I got a lot there.

I think about Diana Vreeland, she was so fabulous. Her ''Why Don't Yous'' were better than anything on the internet. I've been trying to start a list of my own. I just thought of one yesterday: Why don't you cultivate a wee garden of carnivorous plants so you can lord over them?

So magazines were everything to me; it never felt like work. It's crazy that they are nothing now. I feel so embarrassed having this sleazy book sometimes. Did I just sell out everyone in my life including my parents?

Let's talk about your internet reputation. If you Google ''Cat Marnell,'' the predominant image is of you in a slip, with smeared lipstick and matted hair and words written in Sharpie on your forearms. Is this the result of a bender or was it your intention to go for a full-on Courtney Love look?

I've always homaged. Let's just say it was one night, and it was intentional. It interests me that women paint their face every day. So I was at an event, and I just smeared it.

On purpose?

Yes. The reason it's used over and over is because I never showed up for that many things. I couldn't get out of bed. But as a beauty editor who had a drug addiction at the same time, when I got positive attention for that, things just started to meld. Also, I was smoking a lot of PCP.

Over the years of writing the book, I couldn't be high every day. I couldn't be high. I had to take my drugs as prescribed. People still come around wanting to smoke PCP. People don't want you to change. But I would never go back. The one thing I regret is I had these black silk blackout curtains a friend who works at Helmut Lang gave me. They were thumbtacked over my windows; I didn't have light in my apartment for years. I would go to bed at 9 a.m. I wish I had saved the fabric and made it into a gown and worn it to my book party. That's a ''Why Don't You?!'' ''Why don't you save your blackout curtains and sew them into a gown?''

Your book is dedicated to ''all the party girls.'' Can you elaborate?

I always wanted to be a party girl. But party girls don't exist in recovery or rehab. I didn't know until I lost my career that I was an addict and not just a person with problems. Girls come up to me in the nightclubs now, and I see them trotting around in their miniskirts and their flea market rabbit coats and I love them. I was lucky enough to have such strong female mentors, surrogate mother figures like Jean Godfrey-June [Lucky's beauty director and one of Ms. Marnell's long-suffering bosses] in roles I forced on them. Now, I don't have a way to mentor young girls. I don't work in magazines or have a job. I can't coach them, but I can talk from an authentic place about what it's really like to go through this stuff. I'm a privileged person, I've never had to struggle, but I've been through it.

I really think the only thing about being younger is that you look good. It's what they give you to compensate for the fact you're so unbelievably insecure. I love the girls on the comeup. I love these Instagram models who turn around and get things done. There's no right way to be a woman. That's why I feel so protective of the young party girls who are so smart but think it's all about being sexy and going home with the right guys. All I wanted when I was young was to be cool. Now that I'm cool, I just want to go to Europe. If I were 23, I would have fan-ed out, I would have been obsessed with, quote-unquote, Cat Marnell.

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PHOTO: Cat Marnell, in Manhattan, is the author of ''How to Murder Your Life.'' (PHOTOGRAPH BY KATIE MCCURDY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

'How to Murder Your Life' paints unapologetic portrait of addiction
UWIRE Text. (Mar. 14, 2017): p1.
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Byline: Sophie Brzozowski

One can only imagine the relief felt at the Simon and Schuster offices the day Cat Marnell announced she had finished her book. Conspicuously titled How To Murder Your Life, the work in question had cost the company three years and a $500,000 advance-most of which Marnell had reportedly spent before she'd even begun to write. Even so, the publishing company must have known what they were getting into.

In 2012, Marnell quit her job as the contributing beauty editor at the popular website, xoJane-started by media mogul Jane Pratt-where Marnell quickly gained notoriety as the "unhealthy health and beauty writer." She chronicled her hard partying lifestyle in New York City, occasionally pausing her drug-fueled narrative to mention a beauty product or juice cleanse of some sort. Her pieces became the primary source of traffic to the website-with provocative titles like "I spent two weeks in a mental institution and left with better hair." It seemed like Marnell was destined for her own brand of T=Internet gonzo greatness until she quit her job to write a book, telling the New York Post that she was simply not cut out for the 9-5 working world.

How to Murder Your Life hit the shelves on Jan. 31. From the opulent, Kennedy-grade boarding school where she spent her high school years all the way to the seedy, squalid streets of Alphabet City, Marnell's stories read like the diary entries of a girlish ingenue. The hallmark of her writing has always been its brazen, lowbrow quality. Even the darkest among her stories were told in the same breezy manner.

"They were all nightcrawler vampires who raged until dawn and slept until dusk," she wrote in her memoir, describing the sinister cast of characters she'd meet in nightclubs. "This is terrible for the soul but great for the skin-no sun damage, you know? So everyone looked good."

Marnell began her publishing career auspiciously enough, working as a beauty editor for Lucky magazine, one of Conde Nast's biggest publications. Contrary to her trademark druggy antics and general lack of conscientiousness, Marnell has endless respect for the industry.

"Magazines are what I love," Marnell confessed in an interview on Feb. 29 2016 with Gavin McInnes, the founder of Vice Media-a publication she'd written for briefly. "I hated books like the Devil Wears Prada, when those Conde Nast bitches crack their whip, you should be honoured to fucking jump! That's the glamour industry!" When Marnell was 28, she was forced to resign from her job. Later, she went to work for Pratt-a job she never took quite as seriously.

How to Murder Your Life was added to the New York Times bestseller list not two weeks after it was released-an impressive feat for a non-celebrity memoir. The book is as tragic as it is trashy, full of heartbreaking anecdotes about a young woman very much alone in the throes of addiction-not exactly easy reading. Perhaps one could attribute its success to the fact that such a sensational downward spiral will inevitably attract a crowd, but her long-time readers insist it's more than that.

Near the end of her days at xoJane, Marnell published a piece on Whitney Houston's death in 2012-which was rumoured to be drug related-where she also responded to criticisms about her own use.

"So many of you have expressed your disgust about how much I talk about drugs," Marnell wrote, "I really tried to stop for a while, but you know what? No one else in women's magazines or websites is writing about this stuff, so there's nowhere for a female community to read it... It would be wonderful if we lived in a world free of drugs and drug addiction, but we don't."

Most addiction memoirs have one thing in common-in the end, the writer realizes the error of his or her ways and cleans up. But not Marnell. Instead, she writes that she is conflicted-why, she asks, should an addict have to be recovered in order to tell her stories? After all, Hunter S. Thompson-the pioneer of gonzo journalism and with whom she is often compared-carried on the same way for decades without ever having to publish a sanctimonious book about the evils of substance abuse.

How to Murder Your Life is lauded as an insightful look into the addiction epidemic just as often as it's accused of being nothing more than a transparent attempt at shock value. Ultimately, it's neither. It's a story about a lonely girl who never quite grew up-and it might just be the most honest piece of writing to come out in a long time.

"Cat Marnell's Memoir Provides a Window Into 2000s-Era Doctor Shopping." Science of Us, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479656836&it=r&asid=f99080a341e0f71c6b72b34f50de536a. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. "Cat Marnell Is Still Alive." The Cut, 27 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479096887&it=r&asid=76bea6d8de70be893eaca79fe7df25a9. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. "How to Murder Your Life." The Cut, 27 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479096888&it=r&asid=b7d67a2d6d5328dc3608741b4bb525bc. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. "How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 2 Jan. 2017, p. 51. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478696540&it=r&asid=f6472bb10a2bf7c359e7028a97514811. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Bostrom, Annie. "How to Murder Your Life." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 28. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479077914&it=r&asid=152ccf0c2fd75e4e46939e8e00e138df. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. "Marnell, Cat: HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652416&it=r&asid=eb160d46f9e79f8c56609bca27ef3b23. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Carpenter, Julia. "Cat Marnell lost her job and almost overdosed on heroin - then, she wrote a memoir." Washington Post, 17 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481550943&it=r&asid=7bcf2629ef99b96c9289c94497d31059. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Green, Penelope. "'I Would Never Go Back'." New York Times, 5 Feb. 2017, p. 2(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480070938&it=r&asid=dc0f8a32910f7547401fbdbb6f867244. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. "'How to Murder Your Life' paints unapologetic portrait of addiction." UWIRE Text, 14 Mar. 2017, p. 1. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495679306&it=r&asid=c193bceb71901907214eb18c454e8db4. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.

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