How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir

Cat Marnell

Jan 2017 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

From the New York Times bestselling author and former beauty editor Cat Marnell, a “vivid, maddening, heartbreaking, very funny, chaotic” (The New York Times) memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs.

At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America—and that’s all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret life. She was a prescription drug addict. She was also a “doctor shopper” who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills; a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods; a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets; a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything—anything—to sleep.

This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep school—and with a prescription for the Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnell’s amphetamine-fueled rise from intern to editor through the beauty departments of NYLON, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky. We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. From the Condé Nast building to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell “treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty.…with the skill of a pulp novelist” (The New York Times Book Review) what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no.

Combining “all the intoxicating intrigue of a thriller and yet all the sobering pathos of a gifted writer’s true-life journey to recover her former health, happiness, ambitions, and identity” (Harper’s Bazaar), How to Murder Your Life is mesmerizing, revelatory, and necessary.

Ratings and reviews

This book is the most exciting of all that I have ever read! I am Russian and I'm not very good at reading in English (actually, I never read books in English in my entire life), and this is the first book in English that I read from cover to cover in 5 days, and that mean something! I really enjoyed the language and the humor and also I liked that there is a lot of actual names — authors, books and series names, I googled each of them and bookmarked them for future reading/watching. Cat is a very unique person and it was a great pleasure to read her memoirs <3

Thank you Cat Marnell for being so colorful and open about your addiction...I cried, I laughed, and I cheered you on every time you got an idea. Keep on going girl, don't ever give up! xoxo

This book is such a brutally honest memoir, and I applaud Cat Marnell for creating something that maintains humor and light without ever glamorizing the hell that is mental illness and drug addiction.

About the author

Cat Marnell is a Condé Nast drop-out and former beauty editor at Lucky and xoJane.com. She wrote the “Amphetamine Logic” column for Vice. How to Murder Your Life is her first book.