How To Murder Your Life
by Cat Marnell
(Ebury Press, £14.99)
Review by Susan Swarbrick
IT reads like a cautionary tale for the millennial generation. Young woman from wealthy background has the world at her feet, lands dream job working for glossy fashion magazine, battles a spiralling drug addiction, makes bad life choices and, ultimately, sees everything spectacularly implode.
Cat Marnell's much-hyped memoir, How To Murder Your Life, is a lot more dark and twisty than that. This is a helter-skelter story of hope, fear, humour, candour, fragility and ego.
Marnell makes no bones about her "white girl privilege". While on paper it should have been an idyllic upbringing in an affluent suburb of Washington DC that was "so white that you could practically snort it like a line", her inability – and steadfast refusal – to conform to the exacting standards of staunchly conservative parents made for a miserable childhood.
What began as typical teenage rebellion – needling her psychiatrist father by spouting off about feminism; idolising grunge queen Courtney Love; borrowing a friend's Cypress Hill T-shirt emblazoned with a cannabis leaf – soon evolved into something far more destructive.
Attending boarding school outside Boston and newly diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Marnell recounts how she would order Ritalin from her father "like a pizza".
To be fair, she concedes, her parents remember events somewhat differently, but nonetheless the die was cast. Yo-yoing academic grades, an increasing reliance on her meds and an unplanned teenage pregnancy all added to the powder keg. She was expelled from high school six weeks before graduation and lost her college place.
As her 18th birthday loomed, Marnell headed to New York with the berating voices still echoing in her head: "You failure. You disaster. You disgusting girl." This layer of raw, oozing trauma only served to fuel a rapid descent into further chaos, deceit and self-loathing.
Having dabbled in acting classes, she found her path into magazine publishing during a summer internship in the fashion closet at Vanity Fair. After gigs at Nylon, Teen Vogue and Glamour Marnell secured her dream job as a beauty assistant at Lucky magazine and later the controversial (now defunct) women's lifestyle site xoJane.
All that glitters was not gold. On the surface Marnell was the proverbial swan gliding effortlessly through life but underneath she was kicking like mad. In her words: addiction versus ambition.
It coincided with what she dubs "an infamously obnoxious era of New York City nightlife". And Marnell was at the heart of it. Nor was her use of pharmaceuticals, legal and otherwise, merely a nocturnal activity. "Stimulants made monotonous jobs bearable," she writes.
She progressed to juggling an arsenal of uppers and downers alongside cocaine, heroin, crack, weed – anything she could get her hands on. For those of us rubber-necking at the car crash of Marnell's life, it is akin to literary whiplash.
Given the subject matter, the comparisons to Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation are perhaps inevitable. Ditto The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger, which is also set within the glitzy world of New York fashion magazines. Marnell is arguably the antithesis to both.
She writes with blunt honesty about her drug abuse, including the lost days and nights, screwed-up work assignments and debilitating bouts of insomnia that left her jittery and prone to wild hallucinations.
There were the toxic relationships with men who lied, stole from and violated her sexually, emotionally and physically. Add to that the bulimia which led to her spending hundreds of dollars a day on binge foods (nicknaming her bathroom "the vomitorium") and Marnell's mastery at the manipulative art of "doctor shopping", visiting an escalating number of different psychiatrists to score prescriptions and pills.
Throughout, the carousel of addiction never stops. Repeated stints in rehab saw Marnell pay lip service to vague aspirations about getting clean, only to return to her old ways with little more than a shrug.
Even after landing her book deal Marnell, now 34, overdosed on heroin and at one stage her worried agent contemplated employing a ghost writer.
She shouldn't be likeable, yet her whip smart wit and oodles of charm radiate from the pages. There is a happy ending of sorts – not quite closure but perhaps catharsis – although one can't help but feel that Marnell's hedonism-fuelled adventure is far from over.
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