How 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?

Sex is rare and devoid of detail. Aside from a gory moment of uterine hemorrhaging and an evocative description of a cockroach 'the size of a Pepperidge Farm Milano,' any reader anticipating visceral horror will be disappointed. That’s context, not criticism ... Exclamation points abound, as do all caps and phonetically spelled sounds. (Primarily 'AUUUUUGHHH' and variations thereof.) Many, many words are italicized. It’s cosmopolitan slapstick delivered by someone so relentlessly cheerful she doesn’t even hold a discernable grudge against the various men who rob and assault her. As a piece of writing, it’s rushed and full of holes, but Marnell is charismatic enough that it almost feels wrong to complain. She makes me want to be her friend. She makes me want to do more drugs ... Drugs give us something we can’t get any other way and you don’t need to be an addict to yearn for this particular escape. This is part of what Marnell’s getting at when she advocates for a public discussion about the truth that some people—a significant number of people—use a lot of drugs, and it may never be feasible for them to stop completely ... How To Murder Your Life—as the title suggests when coming from someone very much alive and notoriously well-compensated—testifies to the fact that drugs can wreck a person while turning that person into an icon...We like to pretend that many culture-defining personalities—visual artists, canonical writers, legendary musicians, 'generation-defining' actors—were hampered by the addictions that fed their best works when we have no way of knowing what they’d have produced in sobriety. Take away their alcohol, their heroin, their Adderall: Would we still be paying attention?

How to Murder Your Life, has the quality of a dispatch from five years ago: Wow, Cat Marnell is still out there! And…still doing pretty much the same thing, I guess? ... The fact that this unrepentant party girl believes so deeply in working hard and paying your dues is profoundly endearing: You can feel how much she loves her work and how badly she wants to succeed ... How to Murder Your Life is honest, but it is not thoughtful and introspective. It’s actually a little bit boring. That intimate, slightly manic, I-am-probably-on-speed-right-now-as-I-write voice Marnell cultivated at xoJane worked brilliantly for a 500-word beauty blog post, but it cannot sustain itself for a 375-page book ... Marnell’s descriptions of her patterns — periods of manic productivity followed by periods of numbness — are realistic, but they are also exhausting, and they just keep going.

The image of the addict as hopelessly in the gutter, completely incapable of functioning, is torn asunder. She has crippling depressive periods, of course, wherein she does nothing for days, weeks, months, but Marnell is a voltaic little bee for much of her memoir, omnipresent around Magazine World. It would be impossible to deny her work ethic, drug-derived or not; Marnell’s desire to work in magazines and publishing is a constant lodestar, even if one being navigated while on a particularly unstable fuel source ... Marnell’s inglorious exit from her beauty editor position at Lucky—from Condé, her dream company; from her boss Jean Godfrey-June, who, one gets the impression, she truly loved; from Magazine World, which she has desperately desired since childhood—is akin to watching a plane crash. We know how it will end, but it’s still captivating in its accelerated agony ... The afterword features a healthier Marnell, albeit with an orange bottle still by her side (but taken with moderation). Defying the Bull Run picnickers and the NA crowd, she is an addict and a living human being, and a gloriously contrarian one at that. This book is the embossed, bound, printed proof.

Marnell—whose arena is the women’s ghetto of beauty magazines—adopts a more self-consciously ditzy pose, a more self-directed will to harm ... Marnell is a great storyteller. Funny, with the clever hustler’s knack for an energetically spun tall tale, she has an upbeat tone that hardly falters, even when she recounts the most harrowing episodes of her life. Still, reading her book, I periodically wanted to shake her. 'Stop it!' I’d say. 'You don’t need to be more focussed; you don’t need to be skinnier; you don’t even need to be the best at being a hilarious, up-for-whatever fuck-up.' But, of course, I also understood.

...still feels like something Marnell dashed off in 24 hours while on speed ... But this book is a work of substance disguised as an evanescent sparkle ... the blur is punctuated by black humor and bratty italics—peppered with the names of luxury brands, designer products, and onomatopoetic cries of AUGGGH. (The most frequently used word in the book may actually be AUGGGH.) And then, after 350-plus pages of vertiginous dazzle, the thing just stops, with no indication that our heroine has learned anything at all ... Cat Marnell is likely the least introspective memoirist ever to attempt memoir. I love her ... Marnell is delightful! She sounds like a fallen angel laughing all the way to hell.

...the kind of '90s-era junkie memoir that lends itself to the morbid curiosity we reserve for anyone who dies before we discover their work ... It is worth reading a book by a woman who gets as sick as Cat does. Marnell defies, consciously or not, the social structures that keep women behaving well in private ... Often what catches the eye is not the pile of coke but the all-but-blinding whiteness of the girl imbibing it. (She is never arrested.) This book is a meandering tale of largely unchecked behavior by an upper-middle-class girl whose actions have not hampered her social mobility, or threatened her Manhattan zip code or her inexhaustible line of parental credit ... Marnell didn't care about what her life was like, per se; she cared how it appeared online. The only tragedy for Marnell is a life that doesn't have a second life in print.