“So everything is harder because you’re handicapped in a lot of ways. “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. Her mental state is better than it was during the period covered in the book, but the happy ending is relative.

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. “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.” “I would always write like I talked-lighten it up,” she says. That material may not sound like laugh-a-minute stuff, but Marnell’s style helped her pull it off. 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. Which is a joke: she said she’s just trying to give me something that the other reporters don’t have, and laughed. 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. 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.

How to murder your life cat