A throwback to the reckless glamour of the prerecession mid-Aughts; a talented writer wrestling with a serious prescription pill addiction and childhood trauma; a privileged young woman thumbing her nose at the very industry she had revered her entire life: Former magazine editor and author Cat Marnell, who has emerged into her most recent phase of adulthood with self-awareness, candor and her signature quick wit intact, likely won’t argue these epithets of a previous life.
For those less indoctrinated to media palace intrigue, Marnell quit her role as beauty director of XoJane, Jane Pratt’s erstwhile digital platform where Marnell worked after many years at various Condé Nast glossies, in 2012 in the most dramatic of fashions — she infamously told The New York Post, “I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next.”
That book, her 2017 memoir “How to Murder Your Life,” went on to become a New York Times bestseller and is being adapted into a limited television series with Sony Tristar. Marnell is a producer.
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For those less indoctrinated to media palace intrigue, Marnell quit her role as beauty director of XoJane, Jane Pratt’s erstwhile digital platform where Marnell worked after many years at various Condé Nast glossies, in 2012 in the most dramatic of fashions — she infamously told The New York Post, “I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book, which is what I’m doing next.”
That book, her 2017 memoir “How to Murder Your Life,” went on to become a New York Times bestseller and is being adapted into a limited television series with Sony Tristar. Marnell is a producer.
In
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