“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?”
–Charlotte Shane, The New Republic, February 2, 2017
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