When I started reading How to Murder Your Life<\/i>, Cat Marnell’s addiction memoir, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it: her style is heavy on exclamation points and felt, at first, a bit dumbed-down. But as I kept reading, I found myself liking it a whole lot: the (dark) humor and vividness of the writing won me over, and the flow improves as the book proceeds. I do a lot of my reading on my commute in the mornings and evenings, and this book was no exception, and I regularly found myself a) so engrossed I worried I’d missed my stop, and b) pretty sure that I might be making ridiculous faces as I laughed\/cringed\/squirmed along with Marnell’s telling of her messy drug-fuelled life. <\/p>\n
Marnell acknowledges up front that she has a lot of privilege: the financial support of her family, from rehab to rent money, means her experience of addiction is very different from that of someone not so well-off or well-connected. But that doesn’t make her daily life, when she’s strung out on Adderall and staying up all night and then going in to work the next day, any less of a disaster. Marnell writes engagingly about her life, from childhood and adolescence (dysfunctional family, a dad who screamed at the dinner table, a sister who was sent to reform school, her own experience at boarding school) to early adulthood (interning at magazines like Nylon<\/i>, working at Lucky<\/i> and then at xoJane.com, doing lots of drugs, going to rehab, doing more drugs). She writes honestly about being bulimic and addicted to pills and also about her self-hatred and loneliness. I was impressed at how relatable her story felt: when I read about her procrastinating on a writing assignment and freaking out about it, I felt myself getting stressed; when I read about her going grocery shopping for foods to binge on at 4:30 am, I could feel<\/i> the anticipation of that, even though my typical grocery shopping problem is, like, going to the store when I’m thirsty and coming home with three liters of seltzer and three VitaminWater Zeros and maybe a Sparkling Ice in addition to whatever food I’d meant to buy. Marnell and I are pretty much the same age and both came to NYC when we were eighteen, and it was super-interesting to read a book by someone in my demographic, age-wise, in which so much of the book feels like it takes place in this parallel city that’s adjacent to my own but largely invisible to me: I was never a staying-up-all-night club kid; the segment of publishing I’ve worked in since my early twenties is very different from the magazine industry in which she worked, et cetera. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I started reading How to Murder Your Life, Cat Marnell’s addiction memoir, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it: her style is heavy on exclamation points and felt, at first, a bit dumbed-down. But as I kept reading, I found myself liking it a whole lot: the (dark) humor and vividness of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}