How to Murder Your Life

It took some wheedling, but Peg came through for me, like she always does, and HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE, Cat Marnell's tell-all memoir, arrived from the High Plains Library District via interlibrary loan just a week after I'd requested it. It wasn't something we'd be ordering for our own library, Peg explained. Too....something. So when the book arrived, it had that tinge of bad, of banned, and I grabbed it up and held it close. Illicit. The cover itself was a guilty pleasure, the title scrawled in pink and blue - lipstick and smeared Adderall? I took the book home to read and, for the next two days, did little other than that.

HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE is one addict's story of growing up rich, white, beautiful, and hungry - for drugs, for men, for experience, for food, for beauty, for love. Cat Marnell, in gossipy, inviting prose, draws us up the crystal stair of her childhood. Born and raised in a Bethesda "Shangri-La"—her words—Marnell endures her parents' constant fights and her own sweeping mood swings against a backdrop of professional landscaping and a kindly grandmother, dear Mimi, who bails out Marnell way more than once.

So I figured I'd hate it: rich bitch, catty prose, and a barrage of exclamation points. Like, every third line....! But despite the irreverent style and the decidedly "unwriterly" quality of the book, I found myself falling ever deeper into Marnell's sticky web of crushed pills, Gatorade spiked with Ketel One, and all-nighters fueled by speed, heroin, and 4 AM visits to the 7-11 for binge foods. I'll admit it: I fell for Marnell, right away and then increasingly so as this raunchy memoir progressed. Her style is so refreshing! It's so candid! The exclamation point really can serve a function! The exclamation point, in essence, is Marnell: a little showy, a little gaudy. Plus, it takes the right person to use it well - it only looks good on some people.

It looks good on Marnell, whose style seems to edit as it goes, reflecting the many layers of revisions that went into this book. This narrator is constantly referencing editorial desicions - for example, in comparing her first boarding school to a "concentration camp," she admits that she put the phrase in and took it out literally fifteen times. "Let its presence here," she writes, "be a harbinger of bad judgement to come."

And come bad judgement does: in the form of a late-term abortion, a series of failed relationships, a best friend who sucks blood from the character's nose after a night of too much coke, a series of babydoll dresses and an infatuation with Courteney Love, a string of champagne-filled events in which our narrator gets obliterated, a second abortion, many falls and accidents, several assaults, several robberies, and several rapes. At times, I couldn't go on, but go on I did, barreling through Marnell's raucous, battered, wired life like an addict myself.

In the end, I'd fallen into twisted love with Cat Marnell. This wasn't the healthiest relationship, and her final lines left me unsettled, disgusted, and weirdly smitten. In her Afterword, which serves primarily as a way to report on all the book's characters - most of whom Marnell cares about far more than you or I - she writes:

Yes, my addiction is still very much part of my life—distracting me with cravings, obsessive thoughts, and negative self-talk. Yes, I see my Chinese night pharmacist more often than I see my pregnant sister. Yes, I was recently 'caught' doctor shopping on the Bowery...I'm keeping my disease active as long as I'm not in recovery. By keeping away from AA or NA, I remain in the danger zone. Things could—and probably will—get bad again. Real talk!

Recovering addicts, current addicts, would-be addicts, new mothers, old mothers, grandmothers, my mother, and Peg: I can imagine all rejecting this book. Maybe it starts with discovering it somewhere it shouldn't be, like in a teenager's bedroom. Maybe it escalates to reading, just out of curiosity, a few paragraphs, but then burning it, destroying it, disappearing any evidence of what many readers will call filth. Being sick and hating herself made Cat Marnell famous, and in many ways, her book advocates drug use. "I may be back on speed," she writes at the book's close, "but I take way less than I used to." In 2017, Marnell is wealthy, well-dressed, well-groomed, and comfortable. "Runner's high is so crazy!" she writes of her new fitness routine, Barry's Bootcamp in Noho. "Especially when you boost that shit with a little nibble of Adderall just before you hit the treadmill."

Hate Marnell if you want. She's expecting you to. The whole story, after all, is about keeping an addiction alive, sabotaging your goals and dreams, and still winning in the end. Still, Marnell isn't without a conscience. In HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE's final pages, she writes:

So what can all you pretty young addicts learn from this? Beware. Unealthy people attract other unhealthy people—and girls on drugs attract bad guys like a wounded baby deer attracts vultures. When you're high every day, you are vulnerable every day. You are making your jugement all screwy. You will let bad people into your life.

Of her life now, Marnell writes, "I've got a hot career, a clear head, and in ice pick in my kitchen in case I need to Basic Instinct a bitch."

Not quite sober, not quite free, but five stars for courage to Cat Marnell.

I've never quite heard it told like that before.

Eileen

I'd been hungry to read EILEEN, Ottessa Moshfegh's first novel that competed with DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING for the Man Booker Prize in 2016. I'd already read the New York Times' tantalizing review: "Through Eileen," Lily King writes, "Moshfegh is exploring a woman’s relationship to her body: the disconnection, the cultural claims, the male prerogative." I was seduced by King's descriptions, which paint Moshfegh as a feminist, and her protagonist, Eileen, as a pioneer, a woman venturing into the unknown realms of her own capacity.

What King glossed over was the gross intimacy of the book, the grotesque confessions at every turn, and the narrator's relentlessly described proclivities for the debased and the disturbing. EILEEN is the story of a woman disgusted with herself, revolted by her life, sickened by her job. Everything disgusts her, it seems: her co-workers, who she imagines to be lesbians. Her father, who lies drunk in the house all day and night. Most of all, though, Eileen hates herself: her breasts, the unexplored "caverns" between her legs, the slime-sludge color of her eyes. This narrator is writing from a place of maturity, looking back at her 24-year-old self with pity, shame—and perhaps a slant of amusement.

EILEEN spans several weeks in the life of its namesake, who floats from work to the liquor store to home in her father's beat-up Dodge. She watches the world through eyes hardened by hate. She shoplifts compulsively, touches herself at work, and uses the bathroom without washing her hands. Some of the Moshfegh's lines horrify, and that, I suspect, is the point—this is a book that shocks and awes. This is a book about agency and passivity, action and inaction, but it's also a book about being a woman - in any age. What I both hated and loved about this story was that I could see myself in it: the dirty nuances, the graphic revelations—these belong to Eileen, to Moshfegh, and to me.

The book's dramatic finale left me underwhelmed—especially since the Boston Globe claims that it "culminates in a dynamite ending." In fact, as King writes, "For a while we hang on to the hope that more will be revealed about her...that somehow the gun-blood-death culmination will feel as fresh and particular as the first part of the novel. And then we have to let those hopes go."

Ultimately, EILEEN is a bold, brave book—a book not for the faint-hearted, the squeamish. Not a book, I think, for my mother. If you ate up SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW or THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, you'll be drawn, I think, to EILEEN—she's a similar narrator, after all: mannish sensibilities, moments of unreliability, and a raw, confessional voice that forces you, grimacing, on.

Take Your Broken Heart

Make It Into Art.

To a productive, inspired 2017. #StillWithHer #NotMyPresident #Hope

the dangers

Yesterday Henry did it, and today it was the guy we met at the gringo party last week. With Henry, it happened as Kendra and I were walking home after class, after dark. The streets get quieter then, and the stars provide the only light. We walk fast, partly because it is cold, but mostly because we know it isn’t safe to wander around after dark. You should definitely never seem lost, or drunk, or wealthy. So we keep our heads down, walk fast up the hill and around the bend to Avenida 18, where we rush to the house, unlock the door and then pull it shut fast behind us.

But Henry snuck up on us last night. He must have seen us turn the bend, past the stone bridge and up the hill, and he recognized us and ran over and pounced on us, his hands on our shoulders. Before I could process who it was, I felt the hand on me, the unknown man behind me, and I screamed, because I was terrified. Right away I knew that it was Henry, but it was too late. My heart was already pounding after having briefly stopped. I couldn’t speak for a second. Moments like that one, the second before you know you are safe, are the ones that penetrate my dreams and make me wake up sweating. They are the instants I imagine in the darkest hours of the night, the moments I’m most afraid of, the ones that haunt my nightmares, drain my body of adrenaline and keep me up until the sky grows light again. They are the times that must mean less to a man. They must not know how it feels for us, when we’re walking alone, aware of what might be out there, aware of what could happen and the silence that would follow.

The guy from the party last week did it to me today. Under the noon sun, he came up behind me and shook my pack, a joke, but even though we were surrounded by people and there were the police, right there, my heart stopped for a second. I felt that same brief paralysis, that urge to scream, to self-defend. I turned and it was that guy's familiar face, just grinning at me, and I guess he didn’t see the flash of fear in my eyes because he just punched my shoulder, lightly, and kept walking. I had to bite back tears after that. Why do men do that to women? They shouldn’t do it anywhere, but they shouldn’t do it here, here in Guatemala where every day someone tells me what is dangerous—shopping for clothes in the market, carrying credit cards in my wallet, crossing the street, buying vegetables. Would a woman ever sneak up behind another woman? Is scaring someone really worth the laugh? That kind of a joke means terror for us. Don’t do it to me again.

el baúl

Henry warned us that finding the base of el baúl, the mountain, would be difficult, but this is impossible. So far we’ve walked up Calle 4 twice, Calle 5 three times, Diagonal 1 twice, and way too far down Diagonal 3. We’ve asked directions several times, but each time we just get confirmations that yes, the mountain is right there—they point to the mountain, now visible, and nod—that’s what we should walk up. A man at his tienda, a woman with her child, a boy walking his bicycle; all have told us this. Our Spanish is horrible, Kendra moans as we reach, once again, the familiar junction, the incorrect junction, the one we’ve stood at already twice before.

The sun just keeps getting hotter; I’ve never seen a place with such a range of temperatures in a 24-hour span. The nights are nearly freezing; we put on all the layers we have. Yet we’re peeling off clothes now; Kendra’s down to her t-shirt and skirt and sandals, and I’ve rolled up the sleeves of my thermal. We both wear sunglasses; I wish I brought sunblock. I can see that my hands and forearms are growing pink. I try not to think about that. Instead, I make an executive decision; if that is the mountain, and this road leads towards it, then let’s take this road. And I start walking. Kendra’s not going to stand at this corner alone, so after a moment, she follows. The road turns from pavement to sand.

We remember that the map described a steep hill we should walk up, to get to the trailhead. We pass a woman with a huge basket of flowers on her head; a man and woman walking with their young son between them; a mangy dog. The road grows quieter and quieter and then suddenly we’re out of the city, surrounded by fields, ascending a hill dotted with houses and crowing with roosters, lowing with cows. The road gets more and more narrow; the sun gets hotter and hotter. Neither of us feel that this is the correct way, and neither of us says it out loud. In any case, I think to myself, we’re climbing some mountain, maybe not the right one, but something, because we’re definitely going up, and there, now I can see the summit, up there in the distance. The road is getting steeper just like the map said, so maybe there is hope, and at least we’re out of Xela, which on warm afternoons like these grows stuffy, sticky, and grime coats our bodies. Here, at least, the air is clean, the breeze cool.

Now the road thins into a trail, a herd-path, and I do not say to Kendra that this just can’t be the main path up el baúl. The site is too popular for such a narrow path. But we just keep walking, because even though we have our doubts, we like this silence, a silence interrupted only by the meow of that gray cat perched on a rock, watching us and looking a little like a ghost-cat, because it’s so thin and gray and has such big, pale eyes. There’s the sound of grass crackling in the distance where someone is walking with their cow, and sometimes when we pass houses, we set dogs barking. There is the splash of water behind someone’s sheet-metal gate. An older woman peeks over it to watch us pass; I raise my arm to her. Buenos tardes, I say to her, and she grins wide, showing off her one gold tooth. Buenos tardes, she calls out, and sets the dogs barking all over again.

Now we come to a fork in the trail. We have two options. I hesitate, then lead Kendra to the left, up the path that looks slightly more trodden. She doesn’t go first because the barking dogs in the house next to the trail scare her a little, but they don’t scare me, because there, look now, they scoot under the metal gate to bark and bark, but when we get close they just scoot right back in. They’re more afraid of us than we are of them, I tell myself. We walk past the house, the last house on the hill it looks like, past the metal gate and then the porch, which is littered with old chairs and an old, dusty car and some old plywood boards. An old hammock. Everything is the same color, because of the fine layer of dust sifted over it.

But as we pass the porch and start up the narrow trail, which grows even steeper and disappears into berry bushes, we hear the voice of a woman behind us. We turn. She’s standing at the gate with her hands on her hips and her gray-streaked hair pulled back behind her head in a knot. No camino, she repeats a little louder. We turn around and walk back down to her, and she gestures towards the other path, curving her hand to show us that we must walk around the house and upwards. We thank her, keep walking, and when I turn to see whether she’s still watching, I hear the metal gate bang and she is gone.

The trail just gets steeper and steeper, and I can feel sweat bead at my temples. I try not to worry that we’re running out of water. We walk past cornfields that have been planted in small flat places between valleys. We walk under stands of tall piñón trees, which cool the air and so for which we are grateful. We don’t know where we are, but that woman back there did say this was the path, the path to somewhere, and so I allow myself to be reassured, by what that woman said and also by the nice smell of piñón in the air, and the way the sun falls in patches on the ground, and the way that man in the distance raises his arm to wave at us as we walk past where he is herding his animals.

And then, all of a sudden, there is trash on the ground, styrafoam platters wrapped around the thick bushes, and that reassures me too, because it must mean that we are near the toll road, the toll road the map described, the one that, clearly, we weren’t able to find. And sure enough, we climb up a little more and all of a sudden we’re on the road, a paved road that, sure enough, is going up, curving at a slow incline but ascending nevertheless. Kendra and I grin at each other. The pavement feels so easy to walk on, after that thick brushy trail. Looking down into the valley, we can see dirt roads, more patches of cornfield, and in the distance there is fog between the mountains. Farther off there is a city, a dry city built on a floodplain, the land all around it arid and yellow, so different than the lush green of the trees in the hills, the moist white fog.

Eventually we hear the sound of sticks breaking above us. Maybe it’s a squirrel, we guess. Maybe it’s a monkey. But as we get closer we see that it’s a man, a man who has managed to climb thirty feet up and is breaking the branches off an old piñón and tossing them to the ground. Buenos tardes, we call up. Buenos tardes, he says, looking down. The branches land with a dry clatter on the pavement. We walk a little more, through a gate where an official-looking man with a big gun waves us past, and then we break out onto the summit, where most people have driven up in carloads and are gathered at picnic tables, or around the metal slides that people ride down on sheets of cardboard. We walk past the big monument with the Mayan script, past the grills and the baños until we reach the big yellow gazebo that overlooks the big cross and, beyond that, the three cities, Xela and the towns that border it. Houses sprawl below us, and then the mountains rise up, suddenly, like a wall that divides one plain from another. We can see everything from here, we think to ourselves, and we forget the sweaty walk, the group of Guatemalan boys beside us that are eating meat from styrafoam containers and watching us. We see only the view, the magic fog in the distant hills, and we can feel the reward of this wind, which cools the hot air and slows our hearts.