I knew little about Cat Marnell, if anything before picking up this book but was intrigued at her raw honesty recalling and recounting her wild and quite troubled days. It was a book that I became hooked onto and couldn't put down! Whether you see yourself reflected in this sort of chaos or just want to see someone who has had it all be so honest about how having it all isn't always what it's cracked up to be this is a must read.

Sadly didn't love this book. I couldn't get to grips with the writing style, though I did think that the plot was intriguing. Many thanks to the publisher for the opportunity to read and review.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an open and honest review.

I have to admit I have never heard of Cat Marnell until I had read this book. But as well as reading I do like my makeup and constantly watch beauty youtubers. When I read that Cat had been a former beauty editor I had to give this book ago.

I quite enjoyed the conversational manner of her writing and I can understand how she ended up working for a magazine.

At boarding school Cat persuaded her doctor father to prescribe her Ritalin for symptoms of ADHD, she found it helped her focus and started increasing her dose. Af school she became pregnant and had to undergo an abortion. Cat had always aspired to be a fashion writer. After her first spell in rehab she became an intern for a fashion magazine, which Is when she started experimenting more.

Although I enjoyed her writing I accept that Cat did rather glamorous her drug use and showed it was tolerated by her employers. Cat came from a privileged background which allowed to waste her money on drugs. Her father paid her rent which allowed her to go Dr shopping for extra medication.

However she was not afraid to show the other side of her addiction, the hallucinations, depression and being used by Men whilst high on drugs.

I was disappointed that Cat was still taking painkillers at the time of writing, and could not promise not to take harder drugs again.

I recommend How to Murder Your Life as a light hearted but enjoyable cautionary tale of drug taking.

A harrowing, sometimes amusing look at life through the eyes of an addict. I’d never heard of Cat Marnell but I spent loads of time googling her and reading some of her articles when I finished the book. She’s honest, funny, self-deprecating and really easy to read. Extremely insightful and honest, if you’re ever tempted to try anything stronger than a drink or the occasional joint read this first!

This book was such an exciting and interesting book...you would want to read this in one sitting

This book is readable, a bit harrowing but interesting nonetheless.

I found it tough reading at times, but it's always good to read someone who is so bluntly honest about life.

I had heard good things about this tell-all memoir: that Cat Marnell had an honest voice without self-pity as she charted her life as an addict and how her addiction nearly destroyed her life. What I found, unfortunately, was a book that is mind-numbingly repetitive. Once she moved out of her home (to boarding school) there was no essential difference in narrative. Clubs, drugs, drug buddies, flat, sex, job. Repeat over and over. Different drugs, eating disorder, different job, different people. One of the very few books I could honestly skip 100 pages and then another 100 and not notice. Very disappointing.

I could not read this book after the first couple of chapters. I found it to be a very shallow book about a spoiled rich kid and found it very hard to sympathise.

Brilliantly written, easy to read - interesting, descriptive, I felt I was living this book - shocking, honest a great portrayal.

Doctors daughter dives into pills and potions with disastrous results. I struggled to find sympathy or empathy with the author.

This is a deeply honest memoir that resonated with me in so many ways. It is brutally real and outrageous at times. The compelling writing style meant the book was well paced, and Cat's unique voice is certainly memorable. I would definitely recommend this book.

I still remember reading Prozac Nation as a 22 year old and I feel that this book will have the same resonance for today's young reader. I devoured it in a blur of alternating fascination and revulsion and I think that she definitely intends that. Whatever Cat Marnell is, she can definitely write - and at times I found this exasperating as she has so clearly made a living out of being an 'enfant terrible' for a long time. How much this continues to enthrall when you're 36 or 46 rather than 36, remains to be seen. However, as a read it rattled along from one calamity to the next. If you like a provocative read that gives a flawed insight into a world of privilege,fashion and addiction - this could be the book for you. Definitely a 'marmite' read. It kept me turning the pages until late at night - in fascinated horror. Definitely - like Cat herself I suspect - difficult to ignore.

Cat Marnell’s memoir has repeatedly been called - from its highly controversial announcement onwards - a “drug memoir”. Its Amazon page helpfully bolds out the shocking aspects of Marnell’s story, so you’re under no illusions about its selling points: “A pillhead. I was also an alcoholic-in-training who guzzled warm Veuve Clicquot after work alone in my boss’s office with the door closed; a conniving and manipulative uptown doctor-shopper; a salami-and-provolone-puking bulimic”.

It’s true - there’s hardly a page where drugs don’t appear, and while Marnell was apparently clean while she wrote it, the book has the frenetic, patchy feel of an author who isn’t 100% focussed.

But the best narrative, and perhaps the main one, isn’t about a woman and her drugs, but about a woman and her job. These stories are surprisingly rare - My Salinger Year is one notable exception, as is the unexpectedly brilliant Anne Hathaway and Robert de Niro film The Intern..

Marnell first hit headlines for her column on “unhealthy beauty” for the online magazine XOJane; a role she subsequently quit because she’d rather be “on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends”.

But if nothing else, the memoir shows how badly Marnell wanted her ambitions to win, instead of her demons.

As a little girl, she made handmade beauty magazines, product captions and all. And without being patronising, what is astonishing in the story here is that she does work as hard as she does - she recalls getting in every day at 9:45 as Jane Pratt’s assistant, and “saying yes to everything”, loving every aspect of her often admin-based job. The brands, as above, are meticulously noted - the Versace, the salons, the lilac and yellow of mad 90s fashions.

It could be that the passage above, and the constant roll-call of brands, colours, drugs and, of course, makeup, is meant to be bathetic - like American Psycho, reciting all the surface aspects of life while exposing the darkness beneath. But How to Murder Your Life is peculiar because its horror and joy coexist quite happily: it is deeply horrible in places, and yet, somehow, you keep reading.

Marnell’s energy is infectious. It could be that the pedicure and shiny dress and bag and the sick woman underneath are totally at odds, but it could also be that life isn’t that simple. How to Murder Your Life refuses to be a misery memoir, just as it refuses to glamorise Marnell’s addiction (for every party with friends, there’s a night out Marnell attends, pathetically alone; or a friend who robs and abuses her).

The book’s dedication reads “For all the party girls”, and at its best it’s a little like her XOJane columns: neither taking the drug addict and making her a glamorous icon, nor damning her as totally fallen. Marnell first went truly “viral” for a piece about Whitney Houston’s death, using it to explain “why I will never shut up about my drug use”, a resolution which clearly carried forward to her book:
..when I am at my sickest, I put a huge amount of effort into fooling everyone: the hair, the makeup, the chatter. You either never see me—I've been so busy—or I'm my very best self in public before rushing home to numb out again. 
…[on writing about drugs] You call it oversharing; I call it a life instinct. Because look. Look how easy it is, even when you are Whitney fucking Houston, to withdraw your voice and pretend like you're a good girl and not mention that you're using. To slip silently into the water. To disappear.

This is very well written and a fascinating insight into the world of high functioning addiction, but, perhaps unsurprisingly Cat is not a very nice person for a lot of the book and is very difficult to like and feel sympathy for. She gets lots of chances and is in an unbelievably privileged position, but she keeps making stupid choices. And yes, that's caused by her addiction but I never really got th sense that she truly understands/realises what impact she's had on those around her. There's no real redemptive arc to this either, which makes it hard to read - but then I guess that's the point: addiction isn't pretty and neat and som thing that you can fix and tie up neatly with a bow. Strangely fascinating but missing the final step to make it compelling.

The Blurb:

At the age of 15, Cat Marnell unknowingly set out to murder her life. After a privileged yet emotionally-starved childhood in Washington, she became hooked on ADHD medication provided by her psychiatrist father. This led to a dependence on Xanax and other prescription drugs at boarding school, and she experimented with cocaine, ecstasy… whatever came her way. By 26 she was a talented ‘doctor shopper’ who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists into giving her never-ending prescriptions; her life had become a twisted merry-go-round of parties and pills at night, and trying to hold down a high profile job at Condé Nast during the day.

With a complete lack of self-pity and an honesty that is almost painful, Cat describes the crazed euphoria, terrifying comedowns and the horrendous guilt she feels lying to those who try to help her. Writing in a voice that is utterly magnetic – prompting comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis and Charles Bukowski – she captures something essential both about her generation and our times. Profoundly divisive and controversial, How to Murder Your Life is a unforgettable, charged account of a young female addict, so close to throwing her entire life away.

This was an extremely hard book to read. I was shocked and horrified with what Cat Marnell went through. Even the more amusing parts seemed to have an air of desperation about them.. 3*

It's taken me a while to get around to writing my review of this book, primarily because it has caused one of my biggest book-hangovers to date. Cat Marnell paints a world that is both ridiculously inviting and hideously horrifying in equal measures, but either way it is a vivid world and a book I will struggle to forget (not that I'd wish to!)
There was a time not so long ago, that my biggest ambition was to be Features Editor for Glamour Magazine – owned by the same Conde Nast as the publications Marnell worked for. I subscribed to the same magazines Marnell did throughout my teens, I had similar aspirations to her, and we're incidentally the same age. So, reading about her rise through an industry I had long adored, was fascinating. However, watching how prescription drugs had embedded themselves in her life so inextricably both saddened and frustrated me to the point that if she was in front of me, I don't know whether I'd want to hug her or shake her.
Her memoir does not necessarily condone drug-taking and the partying lifestyle she enjoyed for many years, but she details several stints in rehab, as well as being robbed, attacked and generally abused by many of her 'friends'. She is however, very fortunate to be from a family who are financially able to support her and bail her out time and time again, if not offer her the emotional support she probably needed more than money.
That being said, it feels easy to comment on a Marnell and her life choices, because the book repeatedly felt like fiction for me. But a quick look on twitter, really made it hit home that this isn't a fictional character for me to judge. This aren't events and characters crafted by someone sat in a cosy writer's cave. This is Cat Marnell's memoir of her life so far, and what a life it's been!

An almost soapy, hugely and perversely enjoyable account of addiction from a former Vice and xoJane columnist.

My relationship with this book was a little complicated. On one hand, I genuinely couldn't put it down. It was instantly readable from the get go and Cat Marnell's fast paced stream of consciousness narration worked well in book form. I hope she continues on this route because I will certainly read anything she puts out in the future.

I've been a fan of her writing for years. During her magazine and xojane years, I loved her out of the ordinary beauty articles, but when things got a little too dark due to her drug use, it seemed wrong to me that the editors allowed her to continue to post. It was like watching a car crash in real time and it seemed to me that she needed help getting herself together again. It seemed likely that she'd end up in the role of Rock and Roll Casualty, her talent taken away to an early grave with her drug ravaged body.

And in that respect, much of How to Murder Your Life made me feel a little sick. Like maybe a lot of of the awful situations she recounted were more of a brag than a retelling. I'm not a prig who gets into a tizzy over darker subject matter, but so many of her experiences made me feel dirty just reading about it. I was shocked at how nonchalant she came across, like "oh yeah, so I overdosed and then there was an abortion somewhere in there, and then I found my fave designer scarf so that was cool" (paraphrased). It really bummed me out to find out that she's still using. I hope her story isn't over soon because of it.

I love Cat Marnell as a writer and I'm glad she's survived into her mid-30s. I love her style and humour and I'll continue to read her output, but this book was something of a train wreck. I definitely had a love/hate relationship with it.

Big thanks to Netgalley for providing me with and ARC to review.

This book gives you a harsh look into the life of Cat and her battles with drug addiction.

Cat comes from a wealthy family which makes addiction even easier for her.
At 15 she starts to explore with drugs and becomes quickly reliant on them to be able to function day to day.

Cat spirals down a slippery slope of exploration of harder and more dangerous drugs alongside abusing prescription meds.

Cat is in the fashion industry and drugs play a part and becomes extremely dependant on them.

It's not for the want of trying to kick the addiction because she has tried and failed on numerous occassions.

Cat's raw account of her addiction is hard hitting and painful to read at times. But she is brutally honest and open and I feel that's why I liked this book. It was a real account of her addiction and demons.

Is there light at the end of the tunnel for Cat?
Well I guess you will have to read to find out.