These days, Cat Marnell wakes up at 9 a.m. — “early for me,” she said.
She had been providing examples of her reformed life, including that she does Pilates videos on YouTube and sleeps every night, “for, like, a long time.” She was sitting atop a picnic table in an empty private courtyard in Alphabet City, an impromptu interview setting she landed on after an hourlong, failed search for the treehouse where she used to smoke angel dust.
That was the old Cat Marnell, which she chronicled in her best-selling 2017 memoir, “How to Murder Your Life.” The book showed her juggling an intense career as an up-and-coming magazine writer (at Lucky, xoJane, Vice) with an even more intense dependency on prescription pills; in defiance of other hard-partying confessionals, she didn’t pretend to have conquered her addictions by the end. After she finished this anti-recovery memoir, she hit rock bottom. That’s where her latest project, an Audible Original audiobook called “Self-Tanner for the Soul,” picks up.
“It’s said that you can’t run away from your problems,” Marnell, 37, said into a microphone in Audible’s Newark studios in July, wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant dress, her black eyeliner thick, her wig platinum. She was reading aloud from the diary she kept during her two-year solo tour of the youth hostels, all-night supermarkets and grimy public beaches of Europe and Asia. “But guess what, babes? Untrue. Of course you can. You can do it fabulously.”
Back in June 2017, when she impulse-bought a one-way ticket from J.F.K. to Lisbon — the first of several flights she would miss — the problems she had to run away from were many. She had achieved a kind of downtown Manhattan notoriety writing articles with headlines like “The Cockroach and the Cokehead” and “Trippy Terror Tuesday: Fantastic Hemp-Based Beauty for Vaguely Consensual + Very Stoned Hippie Sex Cult Orgies,” all in deliciously strung-out prose.
The only thing was, she was strung out. One night in 2017, just before she was set to start promoting her book, she burned off all her hair and flooded her Chinatown apartment while high on Adderall. “It was complete beauty Chernobyl,” she said, the culmination of substance abuse that stretched back to when she was 15. “Everything that I’d been doing my whole life caught up with me. All of a sudden, the inside matched the outside.”
A few months later, she left New York City with little more than a Samsonite suitcase (nicknamed “Sammy”) packed with neon wigs and amphetamines.
“Self-Tanner for the Soul” — a title Marnell came up with forever ago, and here was the perfect chance to use it — is a rambling tale of bus rides and breakfast-buffet binges, from Naples to Krakow and every consonant-laden town in between. As she recorded it in the studio, she interrupted herself with asides: “Cool, Cat, another airport? Fascinating.” But she was committed in this project to authenticity, to telling it like it was. “This one was meant to be a break from writing writing,” she said. In the introduction, she wrote a disclaimer that has since been cut: “These diaries are NOT what I’d call ‘well-written.’ They’re just … ME.”
Her agent Byrd Leavell said that because of the debauchery, the drugs and the self-deprecation, people constantly underestimate Marnell.
“There’s this magnificent brain that’s inside that whole package,” he said. “Cat is the first one to dismiss it, to always joke about whatever she’s doing. But you realize, with the level of drug addiction she was essentially surviving, and then going to work, way back in the day, how tough she is, and how driven she is.”
For Marnell, it is important that we not look at “Self-Tanner,” out on Thursday, as her Next Big Book, but as a real-time account of a journey that helped her get, if not quite healthy (“I’m definitely not in recovery”), then at least “the healthiest I’ve ever been,” she said.
The result? “I think it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever written,” she said. “Because it’s not glamorous at all. It’s just a tired person moving through the world. And that’s real.”
As she describes in the audiobook, she begins as “still the crazy person I was in New York” but finds that Europe doesn’t have the same tolerance for an adult woman parading around in a green wig, oversleeping past checkout time. “Also I was miserable because there’s nothing going on at night anywhere,” she said. “When I got there, I was dressed like I was in New York, it was like costumes, and by the end of it I dressed really normal. I just wanted people to like me. It really, really helped me.”
After visiting more than 60 countries in two years, she felt she needed to come back to reality. “Actually, travel is kind of empty. That’s what I’ve learned,” she said. Since finishing the audiobook, she has been staying at her mother’s house outside Washington. “She’s very different now,” said her mother, Stacey Marnell, certain that her daughter is no longer using.
“I knew her in all the dark days of her book as someone who couldn’t keep a routine, couldn’t focus,” she added. “She’s so focused now. If anything it’s a little bit annoying, because her day revolves around an exercise class that she’s doing on the floor of my living room.”
But for Cat, reconciling herself to a more sober, more “normal” life has been a challenge. She started to well up recalling what came before: the “devastating” end of a toxic, eight-year on-again-off-again relationship; the 97-pound frame she had at her sickest (“I’m trying to embrace the fact that I’m never going to have that drug-addict body again, but of course I want it”); the dissolution of her so-called friendships with the graffiti artists who never knew she was smart or funny because they “never talked to me like a normal person.” “I’ve really lost all my confidence,” she said.
But then she tapped into that nonchalant resilience, the same instinct she must have used to whirl around the world alone, or to save her own life O.D. after O.D. “I need to let go of this stuff,” she said, like she really meant it. Maybe she’ll date, have a kid, move to London, maybe she won’t. “What I’m excited about now is actually being a writer again.”
A man appeared at the gate of the courtyard to tell us he was locking up, and stared at Marnell, as almost every passer-by does. “You look like an anime character with those lashes,” he said to her.
“Thank you! Anime is always what I’m going for,” she sang back, brushing past him onto the sidewalk.
Marnell slipped out of cartoon-doll mode just as easily as she’d slipped into it. “This next book I’m going to do is going to be so good. I’m not doing it voicey and bubbly. I’m doing it real tight, and focused, almost like poems are,” she said. “I can do that. I know I can.”
Follow Lauren Christensen on Twitter: @lachristensen
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