After coming to New York City once and for all, one of the first things I did was apply to be Cat Marnell’s literary assistant. All of my friends (I only have five) are loud, messy, sassy, sharp, and tempestuous girls, so I figured I was prepared to be Marnell’s assistant.
I never actually became Marnell’s literary assistant, but she did send me a thoughtful email back.
The book she eventually wrote was How To Murder Your Life. It just came out this year and it is compelling.
Most memoirs by rich white girls are unreadable. I felt nauseous after reading the first sentences of Not That Kind of Girl and, more recently, The Rules Don’t Apply. But Marnell’s book is a like a big bag of M&M’s (plain, not peanut): you don’t want to put it down.
It’s chic to say you wrote a memoir not because you want to talk about yourself but because you want to help other people. Such see-how-altruistic-I-am phooey isn’t a part of Marnell’s book.
After buying a bunch of yummy food (including sugar cookies and Cap’n Crunch) just so she could throw it all up, Cat says, “Bulimia is expensive — a real rich-bitch disease.”
Then, at one rehab, Marnell finds herself in the company of a girl from an “infamous branch of a an iconic American family.” The girl doesn’t really have any impact on Marnell’s story, but, as Marnell says, “I have Vanity Fair for brains and I’m very shallow.”
For a number of first-world girls, fashion is what Israel is to Palestine: the enemy. For Marnell, it was like Eden. After Marnell gets her dream job at Lucky, she says, “I never wanted to go home. Whenever I wasn’t at Lucky, the badness came back.”
“The badness” was drugs, alcohol, falling off a stoop, falling apart in front of Eva Chen, and an especially brutal boy who constantly stole her keys, her Conde Nast ID, her drugs, her clothes, and lots more.
Marnell quit her Lucky job. After more messy behavior, she became beauty director for xoJane. The fights Marnell has with Jane Pratt are sharply amusing.
While now fashion flocks to body-positivity and empowerment the way that Wall Street flocks to credit default swaps, Marnell, in 2011ish, berated Pratt for founding a site that is “largely body-positive, inclusive and ‘real’ — too real.” For Marnell, xoJane was “nothing like a magazine. Where were the unattainable physical ideals? Where were the aspirational fantasies?” During one quarrel, Marnell screamed at Pratt, “Why don’t you just hire a full-time yeast infection editor?”
Eventually, Marnell quit xoJane, but not before her controversial posts put her in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and a ton of other publications.
SPOILER ALERT... Unlike a Ted Talk or another dime-a-dozen empowerment campaign, Marnell’s memoir doesn’t come with a conveniently uplifting ending. But the empowerment industry isn’t marvelous or messy: it’s contrived and distorted. Though Marnell’s world centers on beauty products, glossy publications, and vain New York City party people, her description of it seems accurate and true.