How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  Ugh I did heroin last night and now I’m sick, I e-mailed Jane. Throwing up. Sooo sorry.

  Well. You know how in Meet the Parents Ben Stiller is all, “You can’t say ‘bomb’ on an airplane?” I guess same goes for writing “heroin” in a work e-mail, because right after I sent that—like, within twenty-four hours—I was summoned by Say Human Resources.

  Here we go again, I thought, thumping on the glass door. I still didn’t know the damn pin code!

  I got in and went to a conference room.

  “Where’s Jane?” I asked as the HR chick closed the door behind us.

  “She’s not coming,” she said.

  “Okay . . .” That was weird. Jane always came to my meetings with Say. “So . . . what’s going on?”

  “We are very concerned about your drug use,” the HR person said. “And we are putting you on disability leave.” (Or something like that. Surely I am phrasing it all wrong—HR people are way formal.)

  “What?” I said.

  “We want you to get treatment,” the HR woman said.

  “Is this because of the bath salts?” I asked. “That was a beauty product, not the drug. Jane wanted me to do it! She filmed me! It was funny! Bring her in here! Ask her!”

  “Jane’s not in the office today.”

  “Why not?” I was getting upset.

  “The content of your stories can be very troublesome,” the HR woman said.

  “I don’t understand this company!” I exploded. “I literally just got a raise based on the strength of a piece about never shutting up about my drug use! It went viral on the Internet! I have a boss who encourages brutal honesty, and I write about addiction, and then it’s used against me in Human Resources meetings and I get put on disability?”

  “We care about you,” the HR person said. “And—”

  “It doesn’t feel that way!” I said. “No offense, but it feels like you guys are covering your own . . . whatever, you know, so if anything happens to me, the company can’t say they didn’t try to help me!” Where the fuck was Jane? I worked for her, didn’t I? Not for these people! “I need to talk to Jane. Where is Jane?”

  But Jane never showed. I didn’t get answers. Without them, my mind raced; my feelings tangled up. I felt extremely unloved. Abandoned. Betrayed! And also: paranoid. Was Say reading our e-mails? Where was I going to go to rehab, anyway? My salary had been cut in half until I returned to work. And I’d just gone back on drugs—I didn’t want to go off them again.

  I was very shaky in the taxi home. I called Jane about eight times, but she didn’t answer. I left her a voice mail.

  “I was just put on disability and told I have to go to rehab, so I guess I’ll see you in a month,” I said. “I don’t understand why you’re not answering my calls. I don’t understand why this is happening all of a sudden. I don’t understand what changed between today and two weeks ago when we were celebrating my raise. Was it the heroin e-mail?” Who had seen it? The Say dudes in San Francisco? Had someone reported me to HR? Jane’s assistant? (This is still my guess to this day.) Was this out of Jane’s hands? Or was it in them? “Oh, and the New York magazine interview is tonight, by the way. Bye.”

  I hadn’t slept, so I went home and took a nap. I woke up to two missed calls from Jane. She did care! I called her back in the cab en route to my seven o’clock appointment with New York. This time, she answered.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said. “I just . . . We wanted to make sure you didn’t say anything too crazy in the interview.”

  “That’s why you called?” I squawked. “Who’s this we?”

  “I—” I hung up on her.

  The piece was supposed to be about my writing, so I didn’t want to tell the New York reporter about the drama until the end. I met her outside a Dunkin’ Donuts in Tribeca.

  “They want me to go to rehab!” I blurted out while we were waiting in line. So much for that. Then I spilled my coffee on the reporter.

  The interview got worse from there. I ranted and raved about Jane Pratt, Say Media, and why I hated working for online. I was so mad at the whole company. The whole situation I was in. And somewhere—deep inside, at my core, when you peeled back all of the defensive rage—I was upset at myself for being there. On disability. Because of addiction. Again.

  * * *

  I didn’t leave town for rehab. Instead, I enrolled in the intensive outpatient program at the Realization Center in Union Square—where I’d gone (briefly) after Silver Hill. I stayed clean for a month, but every time I handed over my debit card to pay the lab fees or got urine on my hands taking a drug test, my resentment toward Jane and Say grew.

  You don’t even care about this job! my addiction—that naughty saboteur—hissed. Fuck those people!

  At home, I was agitated and isolated, pacing my apartment. I wasn’t “allowed” to contact Jane or anyone else at the site. I felt like I’d been quarantined. The whole thing was embarrassing. The bouts of shame came and went every hour. Bad memories of Lucky, too.

  I was still on leave on April 15 when the New York magazine profile, “142 Minutes with Cat Marnell,” ran. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been—I’d called the writer and begged her to go easy—but . . . it wasn’t great: “ ‘On our site we run stuff like, “Can you wear white pants when you have your period?” and I flip out,’ ” I was quoted. “ ‘It’s like, Shoot me in the fucking mouth.’ ” Then I compared Jane to Slimer in Ghostbusters: “ ‘She’s always smiling and hovering and saying “I love you, honey.” ’ ” I don’t know what I meant by that either. One thing was for sure: xoJane.com was the reason I was getting press in New York magazine in the first place. And still—again—I’d failed to simply say something nice.

  Whether I deserved it or not, the profile received heaps of attention. Jezebel ran a story called “Cat Marnell Is Fucked Up and Fascinating”; I got e-mails from reality show producers, talent agents, and publishing houses—all of this while I was on disability for addiction. Surreal. Even my psychiatrist saw the story—and he was eighty years old! Dr. X. was not happy. He’d prescribed the Vyvanse that I’d popped in front of the reporter (who’d described me as “clearly high”). At our next appointment, Dr. X. cut my prescriptions in half! Thank God he was overprescribing me to begin with.

  I still had enough “medicine” to return to work on May 15, 2012. I was cool and stiff as I greeted Emily McCombs and the xoJane assistants. I dutifully met with Jane, HR, and a new managing editor, but I was a million miles away. I knew I wasn’t going to stay at xoJane; I wasn’t going to quit using. I wasn’t fit to work. Besides, it was weird being there now.

  I stuck with it for a few weeks. Then one Friday in May I left the office late. I hadn’t slept in two nights, so at home, I finally went to bed. I’d forgotten my phone at the office and my Internet and cable had been turned off.

  No Signal. The words on the blue screen on my VIZIO television set bounced around. No Signal. No Signal. No Signal.

  I didn’t get up until my sister came and banged on my apartment door the following Thursday. The next day, I went into Say—who hadn’t heard from me in a week—and then immediately into Jane’s office. When we saw each other, we just sort of laughed. I personally believe Jane would have kept me around forever, but she had bosses and employees to answer to. I’d put the final nail in the coffin for myself, and we both knew it. It was over.

  Jane and I hugged and sat down with Human Resources to hash out the end. I received a month’s severance and health insurance, for which I was very grateful. It was all positive vibes from then on. There has been speculation over whether I was fired or whether I quit; the truth is, when an addict leaves a job, it really feels like neither.

  * * *

  I’d predicted things at xoJane would end as they did. But I never could have predicted what happened next. I left the of
fice and went home to crash for a few days, just as I had when I left my last job. Unlike what happened when I quit Lucky, this time I woke up to an e-mail from the most powerful gossip column in the world. Was Page Six seriously interested in why I couldn’t hold down my job? I responded to the reporter’s questions the only way I knew how—with pizazz!—and went back to sleep.

  Later that week, I went to the deli on Avenue C, flipped open the New York Post, and there it was:

  Drugs More Fun Than Work

  Cat Marnell, the drug-addicted beauty columnist for Jane Pratt’s Web site xoJane.com, has parted ways from the site after refusing to get clean. Marnell chronicled her drug use on xoJane.com, and was profiled by New York magazine in April, the day before she entered rehab, as ordered by xoJane.com publisher Say Media. But sources say Marnell never stayed clean, with one suspecting she even worked high. “I’m always on drugs,” she wrote to us in an unapologetic e-mail. “Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next.” Marnell, formerly a beauty editor at Lucky, admitted she’s not fit for the 9-to-5. “Drug addicts undeniably bring editorial black magic to the table like nobody else, but obviously we make the worst staffers,” she wrote us. “We can fake it [for a time] . . . before we turn into coddled emotional vampire nightmares.”

  If New York magazine had put my name into orbit, this rocketed it into the damn stratosphere. Everyone wanted to interview me. And I could barely get out of bed. I couldn’t keep up with all of the e-mails. I’ll never forget groggily opening my laptop in bed and seeing the headline “Cat Marnell Needs to Get Some Sleep Before She Can Talk About Leaving xoJane.com” on New York magazine’s “The Cut.” They’d just reported my e-mail, blowing them off. I was that big of a story. What the hell was going on?

  I was so sick that I’d been put on disability and dismissed from my job, yet my career was on fire. I was a mess just like I’d always been, but now everyone loved it. Magazines and websites were contacting me not only to talk but to ask if I’d write for them. I’d worked in media too long not to cash in on the moment (plus, I was about to be broke). But where? For whom? I thought of Lesley Arfin and chose Vice. I made myself leave my apartment-cave for lunch in Williamsburg with the editor in chief, Rocco Castoro. He offered me great money to do whatever I wanted.

  Now, what did I want to write? My media brain also knew to switch things up—to do something drastically different. I decided to get weird. Back at home, I climbed back under my duvet and cranked out my first of eleven dissertations on race relations in America today. No, I wrote about coke sex and Art Basel. The dark, druggy vignettes were beauty product–free, and less accessible than anything I’d ever done. I called the series “Amphetamine Logic,” like the Sisters of Mercy song. These columns turned out to be such a big hit that they began eclipsing my work at xoJane! Kids stopped me in the street to tell me they loved my writing on Vice. I signed with a literary agent that Charlotte knew and started piecing together an outline for a book.

  The press kept coming. The Daily Beast, the New York Observer, Page Six magazine—you name the title, they wanted to talk to me or have a photographer follow me around for a night. I was literally walking home from an interview with the Wall Street Journal (“I’m going to be the bald Britney Spears of the literary world!” I told them) when I got a call from a fact checker from the New York Times Magazine. Huh? I hadn’t spoken with anyone from the Times yet. Had I? Or . . . Oh, man.

  “Umm, O.K.,” said Cat Marnell, who was an hour and a half late for our scheduled interview last spring. “I basically overmedicated myself this week.” She explained that she was taking new sleeping pills, although PCP is her drug of choice. “I’m using drugs very heavily this week, O.K.? And it’s screwed up my whole body.”

  That’s an excerpt from a two-page essay about my “spectacular meltdown” that ran that weekend—not merely in the paper but in the fucking Sunday New York Times Magazine! It was by the woman I’d practically stood up after the Lindsay Lohan night; she, too, was savvy enough to capitalize on the media circus. Sitting in the stairwell at Avenue C and reading about my shitty drug problems in this prestigious publication—which I fished out of my neighbor’s Times—was the craziest feeling. To borrow a turn of phrase from the YouTube sensation David After Dentist: was this real life?

  After the Times piece, the foreign press wanted to talk to me! My trajectory toward “celebrity” had a life of its own; it required zero effort from my end. Sometimes I did a phone call or met a writer at a café, but that’s it. I woke up every day to e-mails from all over the world. “Cat Marnell, ‘the beauty editor who smokes crack’[ . . . ]” the Telegraph captioned my photo. “[S]he refuses to conform to the sanctioned narrative of contrite, recovering addict [ . . . ]” the Guardian wrote, essentially praising my inability to get sober. “Le Jolie Junkie Du Net!” Grazia France declared. “Drug Addicts Can Wear Makeup!” [I’m not sure who said they can’t], the Grazia Australia headline declared. And everyone wanted to put me on television! I negotiated with (but ultimately turned down) Anderson Cooper 360º, Dr. Phil, and ABC’s 20/20—even after Chris Cuomo personally and repeatedly called my cell. I did actually agree to smoke dust on the National Geographic Channel’s Drugs, Inc., but I backed out at the last second. (That producer still hits me up.)

  I was too sick to be a media star. It was all too much. I started refusing to be photographed for the big interviews I gave (sorry, the Telegraph); then I’d stop responding to the editors’ e-mails. My agent was pressuring me to do a book proposal, but I could barely string sentences together. We sent a gibberish writing sample to an editor, and it was returned quietly to us, along with advice to yank it off the market. Eventually I couldn’t even handle my once-a-week Vice column. The last ones were so druggy and incoherent that they rhymed—badly (“The Boom Boom Room was full of doom . . .”). Still, people loved it: Rolling Stone put me on their 2012 Hot List alongside Riff Raff and the Ying Yang Twins and called me “Hot Bukowski.” I could do no wrong. Vice even sent me to a glamorous rehab in Thailand and then made me editor-at-large—I signed the contracts and everything—but I didn’t show up my first day, and then never again.

  It took me until spring 2013—almost a year after my career really popped off—to get a decent proposal together. But I finally did. Then I got a book deal. And now—two more rehabs, one overdose, two boyfriends, another pregnancy, two apartments, and approximately fifteen thousand fucking years later—here you are, holding that very book in your chic little hands.

  Afterword

  HOW DID THE CRAZY BLOND drug addict get through the forest? She took the psycho path! If it took three days and a near-psychotic break for me to complete one paragraph about goat’s milk, can you imagine what my ass has put myself through to finish this fucking memoir? I can’t even go into it; that’s a whole other book. For now, just know that in April 2013, I signed my contract; my deadline was April 1, 2014. In September 2013, I overdosed on heroin; by December, my agent was sending a ghostwriter over to gather my “notes” and piece everything together for me (I scared him away); by February, I was suicidal—­texting with dealers to buy Oxycontin. I know, right? I’m the worst.

  In March 2014, I did what all despondent addicts who are about to be sued should do: bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok. No, seriously! When Vice sent me to the Cabin Chiang Mai rehab a few years earlier, I’d met a fantastic addiction specialist named Simon Mott (who also treats Pete Doherty, FYI). Simon was about to open a new treatment center called Hope Rehab on the eastern seaboard of Thailand, and when he heard about my troubles, he invited me out for an open-ended stay. I arrived looking like a DUI mug shot and yakked just from being out in the sunshine, but three weeks in, I started writing. I began this book on the day it was due at a little desk in th
e main house, which was surrounded by jungle and built on a hill overlooking the sea. Simon is a big believer in “get up before your addiction,” so it was still dark outside when I typed my first coherent sentences in years. My head was so clear before dawn. Who knew?

  I stayed two months, feeding bananas to dirty monkeys by the railroad tracks and swimming in the ocean and feeling very far away from New York. I went to bed at eight o’clock every night, then woke up at four to write. I was also counseled heavily about my delusional devotion to ADHD drugs. They were hurting me, not helping me, Simon said. Did I understand that? Yes. Two weeks later, I had the first chapter to send off to my editor—the one I couldn’t complete for an entire year. Then, a few more weeks later, I e-mailed yet another chapter to New York. My brain was focusing all by itself! I could hardly believe it.

  * * *

  Have you ever heard that Andy Warhol quote “I never fall apart because I never fall together?” Well. I wish I could say that. ADHD drugs did make me fall together when I was fifteen. I’d felt like such a failure getting those terrible grades—then I took Ritalin and everything changed. I went from loser to winner so fast! I guess I should put “winner” in quotes. As Charlie Sheen, Lance Armstrong, Lamar Odom, and I can all attest, when you’re “winning!” on performance-enhancing drugs, well . . . you’re actually sort of losing the whole time.

  How so? Because instead of learning to push through my helplessness and overcome obstacles, I’d learned that I could chemically alter my brain. But the medicine never worked as well as it did in the beginning. After I initially “fell together” sophomore year, I used more and more pills to keep myself that way—an ill-fated strategy if there ever was one. I’ve been stuck in a gnarly cycle of “performance-enhancing” drug abuse followed by completely falling apart ever since. What happened my senior year was the first go-round; Lucky was the second; xoJane was the third. God knows what the fourth will be. As my addiction has continued to progress, I’ve stopped trusting my brain to do anything on its own: relax, fall asleep, stop eating.