How to Murder Your Life

January 2, 2017
Marnell, a former beauty editor at Lucky magazine, devoted several decades and many tens of thousands of dollars to living a double life, captured in forensic detail in this “amphetamine memoir.” As a beauty intern, writer and later editor for Nylon, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky, Marnell inhabited a rarefied, high-heeled, and high-fashion world, but while doing so she was constantly high. Beneath her eating-disorder-thin figure beat the heart of a true addict. Hers is a New York crash-and-burn story, a slow-motion train wreck rescued from mere voyeurism by Marnell’s wit, impressive memory for people and vivid scenes, devastating honesty, and true gift with words. In the high-rise towers of Manhattan publishing, Marnell attends meetings on topics such as ”blonzer” (a beauty marriage between bronzer and blush); in the course of her work she meets her idol Courtney Love; but in her spare time she’s doctor-shopping, scoring any substance she can, and engaging in days-long benders that are exhausting and horrific simply to read about. Eventually, her memoir explains how a privileged, highly educated woman from a respectable family dug her way out from under the sheer volume of pills, coke, heroin, dangerous joyless sex, insecurity, depression, addiction, and next-level self-loathing exhaustively recorded here.

December 15, 2016
A memoir of addiction and the millennial high life. The short answer to the instruction implied in the title is this: do a lot of drugs, drink to excess, be flaky and unreliable on the job, and take stupid risks. A one-time junior fashionista--"I always wanted to be a beauty editor. To me, being a beauty editor was better than being president of the United States!"--Marnell checks off these obligations dutifully, having been trained by a childhood of privilege and bewildered, clueless parents ("My mom was in there--snooping!"). From the manicured suburbs to trendiest Manhattan is but a short step, with an infinitely more interesting medicine cabinet than the usual Ritalin regime. Landing a gig at, yes, a fashion magazine, Marnell soon developed an "amphetamine work ethic" and learned the ropes of the trade, including how to land Vicodin and Percocet and hide her habit effectively--at least at work ("I kept the orange bottles in the zipper pocket of my mom's Chloe Silverado bag--hidden away"). Naturally, the author also learned that the people who surrounded her chemical life were not the most dependable or nicest, four to a couch and doped to the gills ("ZZZZZZZ, one of the dudes snored. At least that meant he was alive"). Writing in her early 30s on the other side of it all, Marnell ends her account with the expected truisms ("Strong, healthy people just don't interest the sickos of the world as much") and Scarlett O'Hara-isms ("Someday I'll find a man who treats me right"). It's all delivered with studied earnestness and an eye to shock value, though there's not much left that can shock us in this sad world: not Japanese pornography and not the louche vision of addicts with Jean Paul Gaultier gym bags. What's missing is humor. Every generation needs its Carrie Fisher, perhaps even its Hunter S. Thompson, but this isn't it.

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