How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir

Published by Simon & Schuster, 2017, softcover, 375 pages, condition: new.

From Cat Marnell, New Yorks enfant terrible (The Telegraph), a candid and darkly humorous 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 Americaand thats 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 anythinganythingto sleep.

This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep schooland with a prescription for Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnells 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 (where she rides the elevator alongside Anna Wintour) to seedy nightclubs, from doctors offices and mental hospitals, Marnell showslike no one else canwhat it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who cant say no.