Cat Marnell | A High-Wire Act Without a Net

Photo: Cat Marnell via Twitter

Everything’s working out. My dust dealer Doria gets out of jail and delivers right to my doorstep like the Easter Bunny in her SUV. My favorite rock star's blonde daughter comes over high on ecstasy and fucks my friend on my rooftop 15 feet away from where we're in a circle of deck chairs smoking dust and politely trying not to see a thing. I hear a single firework launch and hiss just above my building. It bursts bright orange and glittery over Avenue C and Rock Star Daughter and I both scream. I'm braless in a mesh white tank top by Dior Homme and wearing Kiehl’s Musk Oil and there's stuff written in marker all over my arms. My friends are arguing about a cat that possibly looks like an owl. A guy keeps texting me telling me he's in love with me, which is nice to know even though I don't and will never care. ~Cat Marnell from The Cockroach & the Cokehead, Vice

If functioning addict Hunter S. Thompson (I think he was addicted to writing) came back today as a female, he might be Cat Marnell who just sold her book proposal “How To Murder Your Life” (which Forbes called “a memoir of her ongoing self-destruction project”) for a reported $500,000 to Simon & Schuster.

Page 6 says Marnell

has chronicled her sexual and narcotic adventures in a book, to include her life as a spoiled rich kid of a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst and her drug-fueled rise through Condé Nast (beauty editor), xoJane.com (beauty and health editor) and Vice magazine (she writes a column called ‘Amphetamine Logic’). The proposal details her numerous sexual conquests. Aside from four abortions, she recalls getting ‘choked out by a Park Avenue millionaire kid in a pine grove by the reservoir at 4 a.m.’ and ‘sex in vacant lots in Bushwick with white rappers.’ Marnell, who has been in and out of rehab for her addiction to prescription drugs, famously told us she’d rather ‘smoke angel dust with her friends’ than hold down a full-time job after being fired from Jane Pratt’s Web site, xoJane.com. (According to the company, Marnell is the site’s most read and most commented-on writer.)

New York Magazine wrote:

Marnell’s own writing is personal and honest, her columns—about caring for her hair when she was in a mental hospital or slipping away from Fashion Week to take prescription stimulants alone—bizarrely relatable. And her eventual recommendation for an eyeliner or deep conditioner seems as natural as credits at the end of a movie. “The beauty product is part of the story,” Marnell explains. “You can think of anything that’s happened, and there’s a beauty product in it.”

The line between being honest about getting high and adored for being a train wreck is smudgy, though. “I don’t want the reader not to be in a shared experience, not connected with me,” she says. “Why am I not talking about drugs if I’m taking them every day? People can say that’s pathetic, but it’s one of my main hobbies. That’s when I go back to the idea of shame, especially for girls. Why do I have to clean up?” she asks. “It’s time to question the idea that everybody has to live a certain kind of life.”

Read Cat Marnell on birth control. “OK, so for the exactly three women left in this world, apparently, who don't know what Plan B is, it is sort of the world’s greatest contraceptive.” (953 comments)

Read Cat Narnell on the death of Whitney Houston. “When Whitney died, I wasn't surprised: women are using drugs all around you, and I'm one of them. Now why am I not allowed to talk about it.” (621 comments)

The New York Times said:

She understood that writing about a tired subject like beauty products (her official beat) required creative framing. She understood the Internet was crazy, and so you had to be a little bit crazier to get some heat. My favorite Cat Marnell headline: “I Loathe My Scary Dad but I Love My Black Eyes: My Three Favorite Liners of All Time.” It’s about how her shrink father put her on Adderall when she was a teenager, which she said led her to become a pillhead. It then segued into an instructional on how get her smudge-eyed look. I hated that story and adored it in equal measure.

The Wall Street Journal: For Rising Blogger, the Tatters Matter Most

The Atlantic: Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Cat Marnell