Alexandra Martin | Entertainment Editor
Life is just too hard. Well, it can be. As we attempt to trudge through all that is “existence” in modern society, what with our social envy, serial relationships, crippling college debt and picturesque meals littering Instagram. All the while waiting to be buried or burned by yet more debt, steep mortgages and praying that somehow we can say, “I lived a good life” at the end of it all before we take a dirt nap or we fade into some vaporous eternity.
For some, we disguise the everlasting embers of pain and anger, feelings that we can’t choose, with hard exteriors and “resting b—- face.” Maybe taking any hard-earned cash and blowing it all on a barely-there ensemble to exemplify just how barely-there our mind is during the hours of lectures wondering, “what good is this information?” Others, we turn to intoxicants, spending endless hours at cheap apartment parties with underage peers or local karaoke nights at surrounding businesses coveting the bitter water of death and lusting for the misty moment when it floods us from head-to-toe.
“How to Murder Your Life” is 350-plus vainglorious pages of raw, dizzying dazzle written by a petulant privileged American girl, Cat Marnell. This literature, if you can even call it that, is a memoir peppered with such a blatant lack of self-pity that a person almost finds themselves sympathizing with the writer. Almost.
Marnell memorializes her existence beginning with the shining and always memorable teen years. She writes about her academic life attending a posh private school and how her father, a budding psychiatrist, gave her that first bottle of ADHD medication beginning the long descent down the deepest of drug-addled rabbit holes.
A tourist of her own life, Marnell finds herself with a bottomless dependence on any and all flavors of second hand pick me ups, detailing accounts of abusive relationships and recollections of nights spent in New York City smoking crack at a rooftop party. She describes the demented thrills of the uppers and the ghastly downs that follow a thrill seeker.
This memoir is a stimulating account of an “existence” that is all too familiar for many readers. “How to Murder Your Life” is just as riveting as it is frustrating.
Contact the author at journalentertainment@wou.edu
