How To Murder Your Life

How To Murder Your Life is a memoir about the life of writer Cat Marnell. Set in the glamorous world of NYC’s downtown nightclubs and fashion magazines, it’s darkly humorous and totally real. Mostly it’s a story of drug addiction and self-sabotage. And the story of Cat, a Condé Nast drop out, is almost as addicting as the drugs she takes.

It all begins with a prescription for Ritalin to treat her ADD at a New England prep school. It continues to New York, where the reader follows Cat’s amphetamine-fueled career rise and fall, and rise again. She starts her impressive resume as an intern in the beauty departments of NYLON, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky.

Murder is a tale of a prescription drug addict and a “doctor shopper” who manipulates Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills. As a lonely bulimic she spends hundreds on binge foods.

She starts her life in New York City as a promiscuous party girl who dances barefoot on banquets but later becomes a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who will take anything — anything — to fall asleep. This could include an entire box of Benedryl, which leads to hallucinations of mice inside her apartment (eek!).

At twenty-six, Cat was working as an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of America’s top fashion magazines, while living the life of an addict.

As a beauty editor at Conde Nast, a place where employees don’t come to work with split ends let alone bloody knees, she hides the fact that she hasn’t slept in days with self-tanner.

She spirals deeper into her addiction, overpowering her ambition, and coming to the realization that she is just too sick to continue working at the magazine.

Cat later finds a different voice as a founding editor at xoJane.com where she writes honest columns about her drug addiction. Headlines include “Gonna Wash That Angel Dust Right Outta My Hair.” Even so, she is mandated by her boss to rehab yet again.

The story gives the reader a large dose of cold hard truth through the eyes of a young female addict who just can’t say no. And no drug is off limits. It’s about being in one’s addiction and suffering through it, and all the highs and lows along the way.

Follow Cat on her journey and the progression of her addiction, from the Condé Nast building (where she rides the elevator alongside Anna Wintour), to seedy nightclubs, abusive friendships, a suicide attempt, smoking angel dust with graffiti writers, rehabs, and metal hospitals.

How to Murder Your Life is mesmerizing and brutally honest.