How to murder your life

Cat Marnell was a rising star in New York's glossy magazine world — a beauty editor with a coveted job, a sharp voice, and access to the industry's most glamorous rooms. She was also a full-blown drug addict, doctor-shopping for prescription amphetamines and downers, battling an eating disorder, and burning through nights she could barely remember.

In this unsparing memoir, Marnell traces her path from a difficult childhood as the daughter of a psychiatrist — where the pills started early — through her rise at magazines like Lucky and xoJane, and her very public unraveling. She writes with dark humor and zero self-pity about ambition, privilege, addiction, and the strange collision of wellness culture and self-destruction in the fashion and media world.

Raw, funny, and disarmingly honest, How to Murder Your Life is both a chronicle of a young woman's descent and a candid, complicated account of what it actually feels like to chase a high while trying to hold a career together.