“One of the most striking characteristics of drug takers,” writes the psychiatrist and writer Theodore Dalrymple, “is their intense and tedious self-absorption; and their journeys into inner space are generally forays into inner vacuums.” Empty self-absorption has been a central feature of the addiction memoir and its many derivations, from Thomas De Quincey’s hallucinatory “apocalypse of the world within” described in his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium Eater to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up (1945) to Carrie Fisher’s Postcards From The Edge, her 1987 roman a clef about her drug addiction and stints in rehabilitation. “How could I have gotten all this so completely wrong? I’m smart,” observes Fisher’s alter ego Suzanne. “I guess I used the wrong parts of my brain, though —the parts that said, ‘Take LSD and painkillers. This is a good idea.’ I was into pain reduction and mind expansion, but what I’ve ended up with is pain expansion and mind reduction.”
The arc of the addiction narrative has remained strikingly similar despite the passage of time. There are the seductive descriptions of the hot-mess louche lifestyle, followed by the inevitable fall, with the addict’s betrayal and abuse of friends and family. Then comes the self-recrimination/self- exculpation. “Waste and horror—what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, un-recapturable . . .” writes Fitzgerald.
Now comes yet another addition to the shelf of the addiction memoir: How to Murder Your Life, by Cat Marnell, a one-time beauty editor at Lucky magazine, flaxen-haired party girl, and a founder of the edgy website xoJane.com, where she wrote beauty advice for drug abusers. Daughter of a psychiatrist father and psychotherapist mother, Marnell grew up in leafy Bethesda, Maryland, living in an expensive modernist home that looked like a glass pinwheel. Marnell had always wanted to be a beauty editor. At seven, she created her own “Beauty Queen” magazine, drawing images of models with magic markers and featuring cover lines such as “Sally Smothers, an all-natrual [sic] girl without makeup! Does she look right?”
Things in the Marnell household were far from idyllic. Dad was controlling and perpetually enraged; her mother was abstracted and a shopaholic. She details in harrowing pages her older sister Emily’s incarceration in a tough-love rehab hospital for teens, euphemistically called a “boarding school” by her parents. Early on, her father began to prescribe psychotropic drugs to Emily. “I’m starting the Zoloft you brought me tomorrow,” Emily wrote to her father. “All the staff thinks it’s funny because I have so much.”
Cat herself was shipped off to a boarding school on the east coast (a real one), where she struggled with bad grades. A classmate slipped her a Ritalin tablet, and she was an immediate convert. “I was downstairs at my own desk when I felt my first ever stimulant kick. My heart beat a little faster. Then my brain was like . . . aroused. Turned on.” Marnell wanted her own prescription—and she “knew just who to call.” (Dad didn’t just supply her with prescription drugs; he would later pay her pricey rent in New York, so she could work as an unpaid intern at Conde Nast for several years.)
Though her parents dispute that they were the initial source of Cat’s drug supply, it’s indisputable that her career as a “pillhead” started at boarding school. Her path would eventually lead her from Ritalin to heroin (from which she overdosed), cocaine, PCP, Ecstasy, two stints in rehab, and a host of afflictions and traumas, including bulimia, self-mutilation, a horrific late-term abortion, and violent relationships with thuggish brutes who abused her sexually and materially. Her career as a glamorous beauty editor ended in ruins.
So what’s the takeaway from Cat Marnell’s sordid odyssey? What should we make of a lost upper-middle class girl who drew on her abysmal lifestyle to write pieces aimed at young women with titles like: “GONNA WASH THAT ANGEL DUST RIGHT OUTTA MY HAIR: Miracle (Uh-Huh) Treatments To Help You Pass Those Follicle Drug Tests, Naughty Nancys!” While Marnell is too self-aware to plead for sympathy, her nihilistic gallows’ humor wears thin after a while, and what you’re left with is the unrelenting self obsession so typical of addiction memoirs. By book’s end, Marnell has gained nothing in insight on why she has been such a train wreck—in fact, she is still a drug user. And, unlike, say, Fitzgerald, she falls short in the self-recrimination department. Sure, while she’s still popping pills, she’s given up heroin and PCP, and no longer goes nightclubbing. She even takes Pilates classes. She managed to finish this book, which was well past its due date, after the publisher threatened to sue to get back her hefty advance. But finally, she absolves herself of much responsibility for her actions. It’s the disease of addiction, after all, a kind of behavioral get-out-of-jail-free card, that’s to blame. (In her case, it would be a get-out-of-exclusive-Thailand-rehab-free card—Kate Moss’s boyfriend went there to clean up, So Rad!) Perhaps what makes this memoir so unsettling is not that a privileged—and talented —young woman “murdered her life,” but that in the end, she has so little to show for it.
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