RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewHow to Murder Your Life is far more than the sum of her collected columns ... Marnell treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty. Several sections read like the drug-fueled interludes of The Goldfinch: queasy-making stuff far more effective than a 'scared straight' narrative. She propels the reader through what could seem like repetitiveness (drugs, binges, bad mistakes, sprawling parties) with the skill of a pulp novelist ... The exclamation points, the name-dropping, the absence of social media, the obsession with print culture and 'downtown kids' and Manhattan (the word 'Brooklyn' barely appears in the book) — How to Murder Your Life feels like an artifact from a previous New York, previous internet, previous calculus of celebrity. The book’s success stems from the wobbliness with which Marnell renders those worlds: Are they gross or sexy? Does she hate her body and run it toward destruction, or does she simply understand how female suffering has been rendered erotic?
