The Girl Who Wrote About Drugs: Cat Marnell on Vice, Addiction & More

Cat Marnell became Internet-famous last month for quitting her job to do drugs. She’d been the beauty and health director of the women’s website xoJane.com since it launched last year but couldn’t bear to spend another summer meeting deadlines in an office when she could be on the roof of a New York City club “looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust.” It wasn’t long after her much blogged-about resignation that the diminutive, amphetamine-addicted, and uncomfortably honest former beauty writer landed a weekly column at Vice.com. Marnell is arguably the Internet’s most divisive writer, not just because she’s always on drugs, as she often makes sure to note, but because she allows her longtime yet ever evolving addiction play out online like a reality TV show. The fragile-looking 29-year-old, with her white-blond hair and seemingly permanent black eyeliner, drops names, brands, clubs, drugs, and emotions freely as she details her drug-fueled dalliances around her New York City neighborhood, often in a stream of consciousness.

Drugs aren’t a new literary muse or theme. Before bringing on Marnell, Vice already had Hamilton Morris, who writes a more reported monthly column about the effects of various substances. And, as many angry Marnell readers have noted, writers such as Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and, of course, Hunter S. Thompson were writing about being under the influence, often while under the influence, long before Marnell was born. Today, though, most stories about drug addiction are told from the perspective of someone who’s already been through rehab, looking back on their using days. Reading about a drug addict’s life while she’s an active addict, especially in real time, is fascinating and a little bit scary. But while her life may appear to be spiraling out of control, Marnell is surprisingly self-aware. This, combined with the ability to write, provides for some spectacular insight on a typically taboo subject.

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Marnell makes no effort to disassociate her drug use from her body-image obsession. “I use drugs to keep me thin and maintain my standards of beauty,” she tells me. “If stimulants didn’t make me lose weight, I would not take them.” In the first two installments of Amphetamine Logic, Marnell’s column at Vice.com, Marnell makes a point of noting her weight. In the first one she weighs 102 pounds. By the second one, she mentions fighting the urge to Instagram a photo of the “98” on her scale. Marnell may take more Adderall, Vyvance, Dexadrine, etc., than most, but she knows she’s not alone in using the prescription amphetamines to combat insecurities.

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Her emails have gotten noticeably darker as well. Before her first Vice column, “The Aftermath,” is published, Marnell tells me that one of her doctors read a New York magazine interview in which she details just how many prescriptions she had in her name, “was completely horrified by it, and accordingly has cut my pill count practically in half—which is good for me.” The rib-counting writer even admits, “I’m actually eating a fucking cheese steak as I write this; I swear to God. From 99 Miles to Philly! Do you die?” Then, before she finishes writing her second column, she tells me she is “vaguely horrified by what I’m putting out there. Because without the veneer of the beauty products I had at xoJane, I am awful. The pillhead life isn’t so great. It’s racy, it’s emotionally barren, it’s full of poor decisions, it’s decidedly lacking in morals. I am not a particularly good person anymore.”

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