Wasted people are notoriously tediousin real time but no one makes for better narrative company than a freewheelingaddict. In 2016, by no intentional design of my own, I read book after bookconcerning habitual drug use and abuse: Zippermouth, White Out, Problems, Diary of an Emotional Idiot, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Jesus’ Son and on the whole,found them delightful. Some of these are new releases but more are not; somebilled as fiction and others as memoir. They consist of scenes in which charactersfall asleep with syringes sticking out of their necks; have their apartmentscolonized by strangers; destroy their skin through idle willfulness or sheerneglect; scrub a dealer’s toilet regularly in the hope of being gifted somedope; sell sex to support their habit; and puke, a lot. Each one of them mademe want to be friends with the narrator. Each one of them made me want to domore drugs.
How to Murder Your Life, the first memoir byavowed addict and ex-women’s magazine staffer Cat Marnell, is tame incomparison, though the book’s breathless publicity might have youbelieve otherwise. Because Marnell’s weapon of choice is prescription pills,scoring means visits to uptown psychiatrists’ offices instead of seedy streetcorners. She never hits a financially-induced rock bottom, thanks to richfamily members who fund most of her choices even as they threaten to cut heroff. None of her drug-using peers die, except one estranged high school friend,years later, and no one runs into problems with cops. She’s more inclined tosmoke, snort, and swallow than inject, so readers are spared lovingdescriptions of the blood surging outside and inside of needles. Sex is rareand devoid of detail. Aside from a gory moment of uterine hemorrhaging and anevocative description of a co*ckroach “the size of a Pepperidge Farm Milano,”any reader anticipating visceral horror will be disappointed.
That’s context, not criticism. Marnellstarted her career as an intern at Teen Vogue and Glamour beforeshe landed a job at Lucky—a position she left voluntarily because of her habit—onlyto land at XOJane, the women’s website fueled by ingenious,often shocking confessional essays, and which shuttered at the end of lastyear. The sensibility of women’s pop writing permeates How To Murder YourLife: The tone is gossipy and presumes instant familiarity in the vein offrequent “you know me”s. Exclamation points abound, as do all caps andphonetically spelled sounds. (Primarily “AUUUUUGHHH” and variations thereof.)Many, many words are italicized. It’s cosmopolitan slapstick delivered bysomeone so relentlessly cheerful she doesn’t even hold a discernable grudgeagainst the various men who rob and assault her. As a piece of writing, it’srushed and full of holes, but Marnell is charismatic enough that it almostfeels wrong to complain. She makes me want to be her friend. She makes me wantto do more drugs.
Of course, that isn’t her objective.(Why would it be?) Marnell never makes her life seem enviable, at least notentirely. The majority of the book is about experiences begat by drug use andthat in turn beget further, obsessive drug use: insomnia, hallucinations,friendlessness, abortions, apathy, profound loneliness and self-loathing, rape.Her designer clothes and expensive belongings end up stolen, consigned, ordestroyed; her parents, despite her explicit defense of them in the afterword,seem profoundly unhelpful. She describes her “ultra-conservative” father asprone to fits of capricious rage and her mother seems determinedly checked out.(Post rehab, she calls her mom in tears and is advised to take a Xanax.)
It’s nearly impossible to find anaddiction memoir that doesn’t somehow warn readers against repeating theauthor’s mistakes; and though Murder stops short of paying lip serviceto full sobriety—“Here’s a life lesson for you, kids: it’s much easier to go throughsomething upsetting when you’re on drugs”—it otherwise adheres to the statusquo. (“I was lonely. I was pathetic. I was weak. I was a loser. Most drugaddicts are.”) The most platitudinous appeal comes at the very end: “Whenyou’re high every day, you are vulnerable every day…. Strong, healthy peoplejust don’t interest the sickos of this world as much. You want to be one of thestrong healthy people — which is basically impossible when you’re using.” This readto me like an addition insisted on by an editor, which doesn’t mean the wordsare insincere, or wrong.
What is it about drugs and thepeople who do them? Why were all of my 2016 drugs books so much more fun thanmost of the other titles I read that year, even when they consisted ofnarrators alone in bathrooms, alone in bedrooms, constantly sick, ruiningrelationships? Sure, people who are high or tripping can be funny andcute—child-like, innocent. Speed makes Marnell happy; it inspires her. “It wascollage o’clock!” Marnell chirps at dawn after a relapse, referring to herlong-standing tradition of making murals out of magazines while on a bender.Being alone doesn’t matter if you’re blissed out. Being in a bathroom is irrelevantif every surface is moving and morphing anyway.
But more reliably, someone drunk orstoned or tweaked out or geeked up is incoherent, oblivious, irritating. Likechildren, they can be selfish, petulant, and destructive. (High, Marnell alsotakes scissors to clothing, and to her own hair.) They can’t help themselvesfrom being these ways, even if they know it’s unpleasant for those around them.“Is this unfun for you?” I kept asking my boyfriend last year during a soloacid trip. I was half-laying across the table at a restaurant as I openlystared at a pregnant woman, and a girl in a wheelchair, and a diner nearby witha face that struck me as unusually long. I kept trying and failing to read themenu. “Are you having a bad time?” As if he had any option but to sufferthrough it. If you’re the f*cked up one, you got an experience. Ifyou’re the sober babysitter, or even the sober bystander, you probably got aheadache. Drug narratives circumvent this effect by bringing readers along for theride. You get to be inside and outside at the same time, vicariously crestingon the best waves without running the risk of a real wipe out.
In a 2012 interview, Marnell evoked aphrase used to describe the ways narcissists elaborately perform themselves:“conspicuous existence.” “It’s the same thing on speed,” she said. Stimulantsespecially make you feel important and rare. It’s not just that they’re fun; they’resometimes the only available relief from your own interminable animalaliveness. As Sarah Nicole Prickett wrotewhenreviewing Jade Sharma’s 2016 novel Problems, “drugs kill, but livingwithout drugs makes you want to die.” I think often of a friend who snorteddope occasionally and who said, of her addict boyfriend, “I want to help Daveget clean. But I’d be so sad if I could never do heroin again.” Drugs give ussomething we can’t get any other way and you don’t need to be an addict toyearn for this particular escape. This is part of what Marnell’s getting atwhen she advocates for a public discussion about the truth that some people—asignificant number of people—use a lot of drugs, and it may never be feasiblefor them to stop completely. Not necessarily because they’re incapable, butbecause they don’t want to. “My addiction is still very much part of my life,”she writes at the end of the memoir.“Things could—and probably will—get bad again. Real talk!”
You either get it or you don’t, and alot of people don’t, even as they down controlled substances daily under adoctor’s careless or considered sanction. When Marnell wrote about using for XOJane and later for Vice,commenters always rushed in with judgment and insult. They were angriest abouther exuberant presence in the public eye; they conflated her candor and energywith pride. But they were also pretty pissed she had the gall to earn a livingwhile maintaining a habit. It’s a typical American conviction that drugaddicts, if not seeking complete rehabilitation, should be invisible, broke,ashamed, and/or dead. Oh, and unattractive. At XOJane, Marnell’seditorial beat was beauty. Her posts never appeared without a picture.
But drugs aren’t in need of a gorgeousposter girl. No book, or essay, or text from a friend needs to work to“glamorize” drugs; all it has to do is trigger a memory of the actual effect,or make a promise it fulfills. “Here comes the perfect world,” Michael Clunewrites in White Out, his stunning account of heroin addiction, just ashis high hits. “It was like I was in a video game!” Marnell says of herspeed-fueled late night walks through Manhattan. Oh, right, I thinkwhenever I read a few words describing the rush of crack, or MDMA, or meth, ordope. Drugs feel good. Like I’d momentarily forgotten. That oldfear-mongering chestnut about dealers giving out the first hit for free beliesthe truth: Drugs don’t need publicity at all, they just need to do what theydo.
How To Murder Your Life—as the titlesuggests when coming from someone very much alive and notoriously well-compensated—testifiesto the fact that drugs can wreck a person while turning that person into anicon. “It made me who I am now,” Marnell has said of her high schoolimmersion in ADHD meds. She’s referring specifically to her mannerisms andbehavior patterns, but it’s also resulted in her celebrity, her book deal, andher career as a whole. We like to pretend that many culture-definingpersonalities—visual artists, canonical writers, legendary musicians,“generation-defining” actors—were hampered by the addictions that fed theirbest works when we have no way of knowing what they’d have produced insobriety. Take away their alcohol, their heroin, their Adderall: Would we stillbe paying attention?
Consuming addicts’ art doesn’t make usevil, just as they (and we) are not evil for using. The wrong move isn’t enjoyingthe work an addict produces, or how they act when they’re high. It’s ignoringthat complicity altogether, pretending our appetite for the fruits of drug usearen’t aligned with our appetites for drugs themselves. “I was a mess just likeI’d always been,” Marnell writes near the end of Murder, sounding, foronce, a little tired. “Everyone loved it.”
