Cat Marnell

Caitlin Elizabeth Marnell (born September 10, 1982) is an American writer and media commentator based in New York City. She was a beauty editor at Lucky and XoJane, wrote a column for Vice, and has also written for Self, Nylon, and Glamour. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir How To Murder Your Life, which was published in 2017.

Cat Marnell
Marnell at Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York City, October 2012
Marnell at Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York City, October 2012
Born (1982-09-10) September 10, 1982
Washington, D.C.
NationalityAmerican
OccupationWriter

Early life

Marnell was born on September 10, 1982, in Washington, D.C. She was named after Caitlin Thomas. Her mother is a licensed clinical social worker and her father is a psychiatrist. At 15, Marnell began attending Lawrence Academy in Groton, Massachusetts.[1] She was a strong student academically, but at 17 was expelled weeks before graduation. She finished high school at Emerson Preparatory School in Northwest Washington, D.C. After moving to New York, she attended The New School in Greenwich Village to study nonfiction writing.[2]

Career

Lucky

While attending The New School, Marnell interned at beauty magazines, eventually earning the title of beauty assistant at Lucky in 2007. She attended rehab in Connecticut for a month, and when she returned she was promoted to associate beauty editor. She worked at Lucky for two and a half years before quitting after failed attempts at sobriety. After overdosing on Xanax and Ambien[3] in her apartment and spending two weeks at Bellevue in 2011, she said she "vowed never, ever to lie to a job again: they could take me or leave me with my drug stuff."[4]

XoJane

Shortly after being released, she was hired by Jane Pratt to become beauty and health director of XoJane. Her writing was "shrouded in irreverent yet deeply personal anecdotes" with frequent references to her drug use, hospitalizations, and mental illnesses.[4] She first received widespread attention when she wrote about using emergency contraception as her primary birth control, which spread through Twitter.[5] Her position was controversial – Anna David at The Fix wrote that Marnell "wins applause for her bravery" in speaking openly about drug use, while Hamilton Nolan at Gawker described her as a "dust-smoking suicidal narcissist downtown swinger beauty columnist".[6][7]

Vice

Just days after her open letter, Marnell was hired by Vice for a column called "Amphetamine Logic". Described as darker than her previous work, it focused around Marnell's drug use and day-to-day life. In November, she went to rehab in Thailand on assignment for Vice but did not write anything.[8] When she returned, she began taking drugs again and wrote final goodbye columns for Vice in September 2012 and January 2013.[9][10] Altogether, she wrote 11 articles in the series.

How to Murder Your Life

How to Murder Your Life was released on January 31, 2017, in the United States and became an instant New York Times bestseller. The New York Times Book Review called the memoir a "success".[11]

Audiobook

In October 2019 Marnell released Self-Tanner for the Soul [12] with Audible, recounting her European escapades with XL Airways UK.

See also

References
  1. Marnell, Cat (December 13, 2011). "Cat Marnell – Twitter". Twitter. Twitter. Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  2. Sauers, Jenna (April 8, 2013). "Here Is Cat Marnell's $500K Book Proposal". Jezebel. Gawker Media. Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  3. Marnell, Cat (2017). How to Murder Your Life. Simon & Schuster. p. 203.
  4. Dickson, Caitlin (September 12, 2012). "The Girl Who Wrote About Drugs: Cat Marnell on Vice, Addiction & More". The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast Company. Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  5. Hepola, Sarah (August 8, 2012). "Watching a Spectacular Public Meltdown With Just a Hint of Jealousy". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  6. David, Anna (September 12, 2012). "Fame Could Be a Cat-astrophe". The Fix. The Fix. Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  7. Nolan, Hamilton (September 9, 2012). "All Those Beauty Products Are Making You Depressed". Gawker. Gawker Media. Archived from the original on November 12, 2014. Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  8. Morris, Alex (April 15, 2013). "Style and substances: Cat Marnell's documented drug addiction". The Telegraph. Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  9. Marnell, Cat (September 6, 2012). "The End, Part One". VICE. VICE. Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  10. Marnell, Cat (January 3, 2013). "Goodbye to All That (the End for Now)". VICE. VICE. Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  11. Petersen, Anne Helen (February 23, 2017). "Tales from the Personal Essay Industrial Complex". The New York Times.
  12. "Cat Marnell Is Back From the Brink". New York Times. October 16, 2019.
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