Thanks to the lovely people at Simon and Schuster for sending me this copy of How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell.  All thoughts and images are my own.

Synopsis: (as told by the back of the book)

Cat Marnell’s story begins at a posh New English prep school – and with a prescription for the attention deficit disorder medication Ritalin.  It continues to New York, where she rises from intern to editor through the beauty departments of Nylon, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky.  At each turn, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. Marnell falls, she gets up, she falls again.

The result is a memoir like no other: Marnell shows what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no.

Morgan’s thoughts:

This book is a totally insane read and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Despite the incredibly dark subject matter, Marnell maintains an incisive and hilarious tone.  And the subject matter is that dark; please don’t pick up this book if you are triggered by drug abuse, abortions, eating disorders, or mice.  But there is something incredible about how readable Marnell makes these unbelievably calamitous stories.

I do have to say, reading this book made me anxious and I needed to take it in slowly.  I never really had the desire to do drugs and I certainly will never touch them after reading this.  I found I couldn’t read some of the darker chapters before bed because they caused my heart to race.

However, I couldn’t get enough of Marnell’s writing.  I even went back and read some of her old Vice articles, which is another (even darker) rabbit hole.  She’s just straight up funny.  She tells it like it is; there’s not a single ounce of sugar-coating in this book.

Read this book if this kind of dark, self-defeating humor appeals to you.  Don’t read it if it doesn’t.  Click here to buy it on Amazon or find it at your local bookseller.