How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  “You are loved,” he whispered. Which I knew.

  * * *

  My dad drove off. I couldn’t wait to get down to the Edie mansion and unpack my rehab outfits, but instead, an orderly took me to a dark room in a tiny, unglamorous little house. There were two twin beds and plastic curtains. The rehab operative closed them and asked me to strip naked and do the old “squat and cough.” I will spare you the details, but I had not boofed anything—so it went fine.

  Then she went through my luggage. Talk about a beauty edit! This lady was more ruthless than Jean Godfrey-June! Giorgio Armani bronzer? Out! I could shatter the mirror and shank someone right in the spleen. Clinique Clarifying Lotion? Out! A desperado like me could pour that shit over ice and make toner cocktails. Everything containing alcohol had to go.

  The only place I was allowed to go besides my room was the fenced-in outdoor area behind K House, which was packed with newly admitted clients. Some of them were pacing around the perimeter of the fence like weirdos, but most of the addicts and alcoholics were chatting cheerfully, like they were at a barbecue instead of a private hospital. And everyone was smoking. I stepped into the ring.

  “For drunks, all you need is Librium,” a woman wearing a turtleneck (it was August) was saying, waving her skinny cig in the air. Her name was Pam. I got cornered right away by a chick named Robin. She told me she was from Norwalk and was just doing five days at Silver Hill—a detox.

  “I’m in New York all the time,” she told me. “Lemme get your connects.”

  “Connects?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Robin pushed. “Your connects.”

  “I don’t have any connects,” I lied.

  “Yeah, right,” Robin said. “You’re doing twenty-eight days? Transitional living?” I nodded. “You must be rich.”

  “Not really,” I said. “I’m a magazine assistant.”

  “Who’s paying the twenty-eight grand, then?”

  “Excuse me?” I said. Twenty-eight thousand dollars?! Was Dr. Jones out of her mind, putting me at this place? That was more than I made in a year! No wonder my dad was so pissed off.

  I stayed in K House two more days, being monitored for alcohol and benzodiazepine withdrawal. I was in the basement watching a dude on methadone nod off in front of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby when someone called my name. It was time to go to the lower campus for a month of thousand-dollar-a-day rehab.

  * * *

  Many important authors have written about Silver Hill, and since I am decidedly not one of them, I’ll make this snappy, papi.

  So. I was very fortunate to get to go to Silver Hill and be in the Transitional Living program. So many sick addicts can’t afford treatment centers, much less luxury rehabs. I was out-of-this-world privileged. I was on-Pluto privileged.

  That being said, I’ve had tanning-bed experiences that were more transformative. Don’t get me wrong; the program was fantastic. I was the problem—my state of mind. Before I arrived, I’d thought rehab was, like . . . I don’t even know. A place where a party girl could recharge her batteries. You know—before she could return all refreshed and healthy feelings to her regularly scheduled party-girl life!

  But no. At Silver Hill, “party girls” were just addicts—“people in the grip of a continuing and progressive illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institutions, and death.” That was from Narcotics Anonymous; someone read it out loud the first night. Then: “This is a program of complete abstinence from all drugs.” Excusez-moi? “There is only one requirement for membership, the desire to stop using.”

  Well. I did not meet that requirement. Even after all the pain and chaos of the last few years, I wasn’t ready to quit drugs and drinking for good! Not at all.

  So I checked out early—in my head, at least. Physically, I stayed a month, and I had a great time. Rehab was like boarding school, except I didn’t get to take my Ritalin and I took drug tests instead of math exams. Silver Hill really did remind me of Lawrence Academy: I lived in a two-story house with a dozen other females, there was a big kitchen where someone was always making popcorn, and the bedrooms were pretty and cozy. We shared two pay phones; when someone called asking whether so-and-so was there, we had to be all, “I can’t confirm that person is here, but I can take a message.”

  About half of my housemates were in their early twenties, in residential treatment for the first time. My favorite was Rosy, who was from a particularly infamous branch of an iconic American family. I mention this not because it is germane, but because I have Vanity Fair for brains and I am very shallow. Anyway, Rosy was a hard-core Adderall aficionado—fine, addict—just like your favorite narrator, me. She’d been caught stealing prescription pads from her psychiatrist and had a car-accident scar on her cheek from when a tree branch had popped right through the skin. Hard-core. (Sort of.)

  The other key demographic in Barrett House were wealthy older women—Republicans (they were always talking politics) from Connecticut who called themselves “drunks,” never “alcoholics.” Turtleneck Pam from K House was in this group. (She was very elegant but let herself grow a white beard; it really freaked me out.) Pam had more DUIs than Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie combined. They all did!

  The two groups had beef, particularly over the living room television we shared. It was the summer of 2008 and the Beijing Olympics, and my crew obviously wanted to see Michael Phelps, you know? It was supposed to be his year! But the drunks had to control the remote—just like they had to control everything and everyone else in their lives. (I’m joking, I’m joking; alcoholics in their sixties are lovely.) They only wanted to watch reruns of Law & Order. Guess who won?

  “Quong-quong!” I heard that fucking Law & Order gong about thirty times a day. As for Phelps, a few years later, he’d be in rehab, too. I read it on TMZ as I was writing this book! Who would have guessed?

  We only watched television on the weekends. Monday through Friday, I carried a three-ring binder full of recovery worksheets from classroom to classroom. I listed my triggers (carrot cake, deadlines, weight gain, mice, insomnia), studied relapse prevention, and learned dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) skills, which I liked because you could apply them to life, not just recovery. My favorite was “Teflon mind,” where you imagine your brain being like nonstick cookware: negative thoughts just slide right off.

  Just like in real classrooms, however, I got bored and squirmy fast. Thank God for rehab romance. Do you know what that is? A rehab romance is a relationship that you have with someone you’d never date or even encounter in real life, but whom you meet in a treatment center when you are both newly sober and horny. You sit together at every meal and make bedroom eyes at each other instead of paying attention in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. And the rehab staff notices and bans you from hanging out, so you sneak all over the place, and then it’s even more narcotic—the thrill of the forbidden and all that—and you think you’re in love, and you plan your sober, loved-up life together outside of the treatment program. It never actually works out—but boy, does it pass the time!

  My rehab boyfriend, Brian—a dual-diagnosis bipolar-alcoholic by way of Long Island—and I would go to the gym, hold each other’s feet down, and pretend to count “reps” as we talked filthy-dirty to each other. We’d make intense, sexual eye contact in the Silver Hill library as we rubbed our legs together under the table in the computer room. I did kiss him once—in the pine grove behind the gym—and it lasted half a second. We would’ve been kicked out if we got caught—and you know me. I just live for getting kicked out of things.

  I always wanted to look sexy for Brian during Saturday screenings of My Name Is Bill W., but the dress code was strict.

  “Cat,” I was constantly being told. “Change your shirt.”

  No tank tops allowed. That’s how sex-crazed addicts get in treatment. There was a swimming pool, but it was closed; we were only
allowed to wear bathing suits on the secluded lawns behind our dorms. The girls would oil up and lie out like lazy cats, puffing on Marlboro Lights from the drugstore and picking apart our thousand-dollar-a-day program. Over at Scavetta, the boys were doing the same. You’ll find them at every nice rehab, in fact: spoiled, shit-talking adult children on chaise longues, smoking cigarettes that they charged to their parents. Sorry, but it’s true.

  * * *

  I had minimal contact with the outside world apart from crazy-­looking letters from my new friend Marco. Seriously, they looked like they’d been ripped from the serial killer’s notebooks in the movie Se7en, which of course ends with Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box. They were written in tiny, illegible script on both sides of graph paper; sometimes he’d draw a rabbit getting stabbed through the neck or something. ­Marco’s signature was always four times the size of anything else on the page. (You must be very curious about him by now.)

  My only visitor at Silver Hill was Charlotte, in a vintage, chauffeured black Mercedes, no less. She looked fabulous in her baby duck–yellow tube top, bell-bottom jeans, wedge heels, and huge sunglasses—like she’d just had sex with Jimmy Page! I showed her the Edie house—Scavetta, where my Brian lived—and the building that Mariah Carey allegedly rented all for herself after she went on MTV’s TRL and pushed that ice cream cart around without any pants on.

  I didn’t hear from my parents.

  “It’s so strange that your mom won’t return my calls,” my counselor said.

  “Shocking,” I sneered. Always the victim, you know. It turned out that my parents were out West on one of those bizarre “we’re-ending-our-marriage” vacations you always read about celebrities like Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck taking in People magazine. My dad called when they were back.

  “Do you have any questions you want to ask me?” he said. “About me and Mom?”

  “No,” I huffed. I was in rehab. God. Did it always have to be about them?

  I only spoke to my mother once the whole month—and no, not to ask her if she was okay. To berate her! It was late August—I’d been in treatment three weeks—and the lease on the mouse apartment was up September first. My mom was in charge of packing up my crazy life and putting it into storage.

  “Mom, I know every single magazine in my apartment!” I freaked out over the phone. “Do not throw out any of them! I will never speak to you again!” I should have been grateful, but instead I just felt out of control.

  The person I heard from the most was Jean Godfrey-June. She and the girls in Lucky beauty sent care packages of every tabloid from Hudson News—plus bags of treats and Blow Pops. Coconut and vanilla-­scented beauty products, too.

  And there were letters from Jean. I took the first one into the backyard and sat under a tree and opened it. It was on baby-blue stationery, with Jean’s familiar scribbly handwriting in blue felt-tip editing pen.

  The page I have in front of me now begins—midletter—in a typical JGJ way:

  And Hilton saw Jay Z & Beyoncé get out of an Escalade in front of Nobu.

  . . . which made me laugh. And then:

  I miss you TERRIBLY—everyone does—& I’m so proud of what you’re doing. It takes guts & strength, which I know you to have in spades, but it’s still amazing. I will repeat the only advice which has ever really resonated with me re: pain—emotional as well as physical—which is:

  It’s not always going to feel the way it feels today.

  It’s just true & key to remember. It certainly helped during childbirth!

  You are so full of imagination & brilliance & humor, & those things will shine out even brighter as you take care of yourself. Think of how you will RULE!!

  I cried and cried—I can see that I did! The ink on the page is all smudgy from my tears. No one had ever said such nice things to me. I knew I would keep this letter close to my bed for the rest of my life.

  * * *

  Connecticut in late summer is reliably just beyond; accordingly, the weeks I spent there in 2008 passed in a jiffy. The friends, the rehab romance, the clean air, the clean body—it all did wonders! By the end of the month, I was happy, fit, and properly socialized. Again, I’d had a lot of fun—which isn’t against the rules. It’s good for addicts to realize they can have a great time without drugs, you know?

  Then it was early September 2008, a week before my twenty-sixth birthday. The month was over, and it was time to go home. The women in my dorm gathered in the living room for a special ceremony and said good-bye one by one.

  “You came here because you lost your marbles,” Rosy recited. Someone handed me two of them. “And now we are giving them back to you . . .” I still have those marbles in a lab beaker on my desk, incidentally.

  It was a lovely ceremony, and I went through the motions . . . but look. I think it’s really hard to get sober in your twenties! We’ve all heard about people who have to lose everything—their homes, their jobs, their husbands or wives, their teeth—to finally get clean and start over. Maybe I’d lost my house keys a few times (I really had to stop letting cokeheads pass them around at parties), but that was it. I was only twenty-five! I still had my job at Lucky; my family’s support; my health . . . I hadn’t lost anything. Not yet.

  Chapter Twelve

  I RETURNED TO WORK ON September 9, 2008. The next afternoon, Dawn, Cristina, and I sat in Jean’s office eating banana cake from Billy’s. It was my twenty-sixth birthday. Jean gave me a two-hundred-dollar John Derian Company gift certificate and a handwritten note on her favorite D.L. & Co. skull stationery. She told me that she was so proud of me for being brave and getting help, and that I was so valuable to her and to the magazine. I had the best boss ever. That hadn’t changed.

  But two things were très different at 4 Times Square. Number one: there was a new delicacy in the cafeteria! Flatbread—an oversize cracker piled with chicken cubes and asparagus spears—was very low-carb, not least of all because it was almost impossible to eat. The toppings always fell off. It was impractical, ridiculous—and a sensation! Jean was just mental for it; all the Nasties were. On Thursdays, aka Flatbread Day, I sent interns to stand in the line, which was always out the cafeteria door.

  The other big thing was . . . an economic crisis, of sorts, in publishing and perhaps the world at large. For some reason the magazine industry was getting it the worst. Ad sales were plummeting! At least I think that’s what was happening. I actually do not have much insight into what the hell was going on, quite frankly. The economy isn’t my thing (though I have been profiled in the Wall Street Journal). So forgive me if I’m not writing the circumstances of this messy time quite right.

  All I can tell you for sure is what it was like in the thick of it. In the fall of 2008, we gathered over and over again in the sixth-floor conference room for ultrasomber staff meetings. KF and our managing editor, Regan, always had bad news. CEO Chuck Townsend and Mr. Newhouse were ordering cuts, cuts, and more cuts. Budgets for expenses and meals and freelancers were to be absolutely reduced. I wasn’t supposed to take a town car home, no matter how late I worked (I did anyway). We weren’t even allowed to expense flatbread anymore! Shit was getting real.

  Magazines kept shutting down. Men’s Vogue—folded! Portfolio—kaput. Vogue Living? Bye, bitch! Even Teen Vogue was rumored to be on the chopping block. Hearst Corporation had just shuttered CosmoGirl! Nothing was performing well.

  Dark days. Every morning there was something in the papers.

  “IT’S NASTY OVER AT CONDÉ,” a typical New York Post headline from that October read. Then:

  The ax fell yesterday at Condé Nast. When the counting is done, it is expected that more than 100 people will be out of work in a one-day bloodbath that is unprecedented in the history of the company.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Jean told me privately.

  Phew.

  So my career was secure after
rehab. My home life? Not so much. Everything from the shambolic mouse apartment was in a storage unit on the West Side. Whenever I thought about going over there, I felt terrible dread.

  In the meantime, I had Empire State Building views from my sister’s sofa in her immaculate Gramercy Park apartment. It was like an issue of Real Simple in there! So nice. I borrowed outfits from Em’s color-coded closet and bathed in her squeaky-clean tub. I was sober and enrolled in an outpatient program. I dutifully attended groups and one-on-one therapy at Realization Center in Union Square.

  “I’m going to need the names of these psychiatrists uptown,” my counselor would say.

  “Give me a few days,” I always answered.

  Then I’d go pee into a cup—or at least try to. Stupid drug tests! I’ve been taking them for nearly a decade now and I still get pee on my hands. I’d really like to invent some sort of contraption for female addicts and take it to Shark Tank.

  “What would even happen if I tested positive for something?” I asked my counselor one day.

  “Nothing,” she said. “We’d just talk to you about it.”

  Hmm.

  * * *

  Being clean had felt really great in Connecticut. But back in Manhattan, not being on stimulants just felt . . . wrong. My energy didn’t match the city’s energy anymore. I felt very fuzzy around the edges, and just . . . weird and lazy. And I was always hungry! So hungry. I’d gained fifteen pounds since I’d stopped taking Adderall.

  “I’ll have a plain bagel untoasted with sun-dried tomato cream cheese . . .” I ordered Pick a Bagel at least once a day. “A large fresh-squeezed orange juice . . .”

  Blerrg! Then I’d barf it up in my poor sister’s toilet while she watched Gossip Girl in the living room. It’s very bad bulimia manners to yak in other people’s cribs. But I was desperate to feel like I was in control.