My brains were so scrambled you could’ve ordered them for brunch at Sarabeth’s I let art-world guys choke me out during unprotected sex I only had one friend, a Dash Snow–wannabe named Marco who tried to stick syringes in my neck and once slurped from my nostrils when I got a cocaine nosebleed my roommate, Nev “Catfish” Schulman, wanted me out of our East Village two-bedroom my parents weren’t talking to me ever since I’d stuck my dad with a thirty-thousand-dollar rehab bill.

A pillhead! I was also an alcoholic-in-training who drank warm Veuve Clicquot after work, alone in my boss’s office with the door closed a conniving uptown doctor shopper who haunted twenty-four-hour pharmacies while my coworkers were at home watching True Blood in bed with their boyfriends a salami-and- provolone-puking bulimic who spent a hundred dollars a day on binge foods when things got bad (and they got bad often) a weepy, wobbly hallucination-prone insomniac who jumped six feet in the air à la LeBron James and gobbled Valium every time a floorboard squeaked in her apartment a tweaky self-mutilator who sat in front of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, digging gory abscesses into her bikini line with Tweezerman Satin Edge Needle Nose Tweezers a slutty and self-loathing downtown party girl fellatrix rushing to ruin and - perhaps most of all - a lonely weirdo who felt like she was underwater all of the time. But beneath the surface, I was full of secrets: I was an addict, for one. Yep! I was twenty-six years old and an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America, and that’s all that most people knew about me. But then I’d just go home, pound Froot Loops in a dark trance, or get high with my friend Marco. “You need to go see a doctor,” my boss - legendary beauty director Jean Godfrey-June - said every day when I hobbled into her office in ballerina flats. I think I broke a bottle of Kiehl’s Musk on my bathroom floor and then I stepped on it, I guess, and I never wound up getting the shards taken out.

It was the summer of 2009, and I was walking with a bit of a limp because I had broken glass in my foot from … well, I wasn’t sure what from, exactly. Earlier that evening, I’d been picked up at the Condé Nast building in midtown and chauffeured there. It was the VIP tent of Cirque du Soleil - you know, the famous French Canadian circus show? They’d set up a big, white tent - it sort of looked like a peaky marshmallow - called the Grand Chapiteau on Randall’s Island, which was up on the East River just off Manhattan. And fine, I didn’t walk into a club, per se - not on that night, anyway.

How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell