On the heels of a whirlwind publicity tour for her hit memoir, How to Murder Your Life, Cat Marnell has a refreshing sense of humor about the exploitative nature of journalism. Arriving to our interview in one of her now-signature flowing pastel wigs—whose origins have been hazily described and never quite nailed down in countless profiles—she told me the truth is that her father made her get a lobotomy, and the wigs cover up the scars. Which is a joke: she said she’s just trying to give me something that the other reporters don’t have, and laughed.
If you think that’s funny, you should read Marnell’s book, which chronicles the lonely and treacherous spiral of her prescription drug habit, her eating disorder, her roller-coaster careers at Condé Nast (Vanity Fair’s parent company) and XOJane, her heroin overdose, her troubled and privileged childhood, her unsavory sex life, and her abusive friendship with a mentally unstable narcissist who regularly stole from her, including, at one point, everything in her apartment. That material may not sound like laugh-a-minute stuff, but Marnell’s style helped her pull it off. “I would always write like I talked—lighten it up,” she says. “If you’re not having fun with it, then no one’s going to have fun reading it.” So after she finished a draft, she says, “I went back in and wrote it funny.”
That’s how a woman whose notoriety could have seemed like 15 minutes of fame in 2012—a series of wild columns for XOJane recommending beauty treatments to pass drugs tests and Plan B as a regular form of contraception, then a light-a-match-and-walk-away announcement in Page Six that she was quitting her job to “be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book”—wrote one of the year’s most buzzed-about books.
Its publication in January was greeted by a swath of glowing profiles and tabloid stories written in the scandalous tone usually reserved for rock stars and troubled actors, and is now on the New York Times best-seller list. Yet Marnell is ambivalent about the accolades, even though they seem like a dream come true for a woman whose specialty is holding forth on topics from reality TV to Wendi Deng. “It’s really weird,” she said of seeing her name in bold in Page Six. “It’s very surreal, and I do just think that I must have manifested it—like The Secret. I really must have.” She mused on whether her obsession with Bald Britney may have led to her own hair drama, and then concluded, “I just don’t know what it is that puts me in these places, except it just must be what I’m good at. I’m not really a fame-seeker. I turn down a million things.”
Her mental state is better than it was during the period covered in the book, but the happy ending is relative. “It could be in much better shape, but that has to do, a lot, because I do choose to continue using—not as heavily,” she said. “So everything is harder because you’re handicapped in a lot of ways. So all of this, it’s really great, but I’m really so the same, my life really hasn’t changed, except financially.”
But you want to know what’s next, and Marnell does, too. Her—ahem—addictive tone and ready humor, as well as the excitement the book met upon publication, make it easy to see the book as a film. Will it be a kind of Devil Wears Prada for the Harmony Korine set? She said she’s considering working with friends of hers, Elara Productions, to develop the 400 pages she cut from her 800-page manuscript (that’s right!) on her downtown life among graffiti writers and weirdos and artists into a TV show. “This would obviously be less money—it wouldn’t be the Hollywood ‘big thing.’ Art Basel would be one episode,” she mused—it would show “the part of downtown that people haven’t seen.” As for who would play Marnell: “Oh God, there’s like a million of them, right?”—presumably meaning young Bambi-like blondes—and then said, “I like Ashley Benson!” (While we’re on the topic of alleged Marnell look-alikes, she summarizes the Twitterati’s fascination with her resemblance to Tiffany Trump thus: “I don’t think anyone should compare anyone to someone they look like unless you’re like, ‘You look like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.’”)
And she also wants to travel the world—“I gotta get out of here for a while. Like a year”—and maybe be a lifestyle guru: “I really think I have cool stuff!” she said. Full—fun!—disclosure: having followed Marnell’s writing for XOJane and Vice, I first met her when I Airbnb’d her last apartment two years ago, and she really does have cool stuff. Big sheepskin rugs, twinkling lights everywhere, crazy-patterned blankets, a crazy Jeremy Scott white leather jacket with giant angel wings affixed to the back, a needlepoint New York Post–cover pillow by Brigid Berlin, and one of the best and most eclectic book collections I’ve ever seen. She calls the aesthetic “enchanted nursery,” and she would give the Goops and Draper James of the world a run for their money.
Marnell joked (or at least laughed when she said) that she’s unemployable, but the thing is, she would actually make a fantastic media writer. She has energetic and sophisticated ideas about how the flagging print-magazine industry can save itself, and she is savvy but somehow uncynical about how the worlds of celebrity and media tangle with each other. One of the best parts of Marnell’s book is her explanation of the fashion magazine, Beauty Queen Magazine, that she regularly hand drew as a child. As an adult, as she recounts in her book, she very savvily navigated the byzantine ladder of the magazine industry, though she was struggling with very serious addiction. She has a clear understanding of its magnetism and its flaws. She has a photographic memory of media miscellany ranging from Anna Wintour’s first Vogue cover to the cartoons that filled Hustler in the 80s.
Reading the book, I thought not of the emerging class of young female memoirists, but of the late New York Times media columnist David Carr’s The Night of the Gun, which traces a path from crack addiction to Times reporter that is so preposterously unlikely you have to wonder if it was divinely ordained. He, too, had an unflagging hustle and intense curiosity about a broad range of subjects. The media machinery fascinated him, but you could never accuse him of industry navel-gazing.
Carr’s memoir, of course, had a sunnier denouement: a happy marriage, two teenage girls, and a booming career at the paper of record. Part of this is that Carr made his name while hiding his addiction, whereas Marnell made a name for herself by talking about hers. And Carr’s memoir was one of recovery, while Marnell continues to use. Because she does, Marnell’s story is not one of redemption but of ambition, of whether charisma and talent can override one’s inability to say “no.”
Marnell’s book does not end with the kind of catharsis we usually believe we are due in addiction memoirs. That may continue to earn her detractors, simply because of the obsolete notion that confessional writing must be justified with a puritanical image of recovery.
“But what are you gonna do?” she said, discussing her haters. “Wear a unicorn wig and send God the bill—right?”
