"I was unfamiliar with Cat Marnell before I read How to Murder Your Life. After doing some digging, my understanding is that she was notorious among the downtown New York crowd in the early 2010s for her drug use and wild reputation. (Side note: Marnell seems stuck in this era. Her Instagram feels like a time machine from 2011).

In her debut memoir, Cat Marnell weaves the story of her life of privilege and addiction. With a playful wink, she tells us how she went from a Ritalin-snorting boarding school teen, to a barely-functioning beauty editor at a major fashion magazine, to a semi-famous hot mess writer for Vice. Along the way, she overdoses, does stints in rehabs and mental hospitals, has multiple abortions, and struggles with bulimia.

Marnell comes across as selfish, narcissistic and unlikeable. She tries to make up for it by being self-aware about it, proudly introducing herself as a privileged white girl. Little notes about how she “knows how this sounds� appear throughout. Unfortunately for Marnell, self-awareness can’t replace self-reflection, and her whole 21st century Edie Sedgwick thing gets more annoying and less endearing once she reaches her mid 20s. She’s not totally hatable, but it’s sometimes hard to see why we should care about her.

Marnell’s stories of drugs, fashion and “doctor shopping� are entertaining at first, but they get old after a while. We hear the same stories of her insomnia and erratic behavior over and over and over again. Rather than filling in the blanks with something of any substance, she goes into great detail about brands of makeup and clothes that her and her co-workers wear, apparently not realizing (or more likely, not caring) that it’s meaningless to most readers. She drops a lot of meaningless names, too.

I applaud Marnell for the honesty it took to write this memoir, but it also feels self-indulgent. Marnell can’t connect her addiction to anything bigger than herself, and it makes for a boring piece of writing. Addicts are often self-centered, and Marnell admits that she still is one. Maybe what will drive her to get clean is what will drive her to write a memoir worth reading."