title: How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir
author:  Cat Marnell 
description: SensationalMarnell treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty. Several sections read like the drug-fueled interludes of <i>The Goldfinch</i>She propels the reader through what could seem like repetitiveness (drugs, binges, bad mistakes, sprawling parties) with the skill of a pulp novelist. (<i>New York Times Book Review</i>)<br /><br />A remarkably honest memoir of addiction...Marnell is a great storyteller. Funny, with the clever hustlers knack for an energetically spun tall tale. (<i>The New Yorker</i>)<br /><br />"One of the years most buzzed-about books...Herahemaddictive tone and ready humor, as well as the excitement the book met upon publication, make it easy to see the book as a film. [...]Reading the book, I thought not of the emerging class of young female memoirists, but of the late<i>New York Times</i>media columnist<b>David Carrs</b><i>The Night of the Gun."</i> (<i>Vanity Fair</i>)<br /><br />"This book is a work of substance disguised as an evanescent sparkle...350-plus pages of vertiginous dazzle...Marnell is all coked-up crackle and energetic, angel-dusted impunity." (<i>Slate</i>)<br /><br />"Marnells authorial debut is noteworthy for its compelling twin narratives of a rising young talent in the rarefied world of pre-2008 print publishingand of her simultaneous downward spiral into a death-defying feedback loop of substance abuse, insomnia, bulimiaand violent relationshipsall told in a prose style that is like a spit in the face to an English teacheror to the notion of authority altogether. Her signature emphatic all caps and charmingly sarcastic colloquialisms, her crass irreverence and staggering self-awareness, are themselves, forgive the figure of speech, addictive." (<i>LA Times</i>)<br /><br />The literary love child of Keith Richardss<i> Life </i>and <i>Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love</i>. (<i>Nylon</i>)<br /><br />"Marnell has made a career on, well, being a disaster. Or, more accurately, on being an addict, a descent she details with bracing honesty in her new book." (<i>Washington Post</i>)<br /><br /><i>"How to Murder Your Life</i>is so readable even when it isn't especially easy to read...All of her relationship stories are ones that put the "brute" in "brutally honest." All of her glamorous evenings end like they're scripted by Cronenberg...<i>How to Murder Your Life</i>is the rare drug memoir that isn't redemptive. It's better because of it." (<i>i-D, Vice</i>)<br /><br />Jaw-dropping. (<i>New York Post</i>)<br /><br />"The book is as compelling  and as problematic  as her magazine writing: vivid, maddening, heartbreaking, very funny, chaotic and repetitive, as benders are." (<i>New York Times</i>)
zlib_text:  
   
   
  PUNISHING
  Me
  Shaft on Tour Book Six
  By: Cat Mason
  
   
  Shaft on Tour:
  Escaping Me
  Facing Me
  Chasing Me
  Shafting the Halls (A Holiday Short)
  Fighting Me
  
   
  All Rights Reserved. This work may not be reproduced or transmitted
  in any form or by any means (electronic, photographic) in part or
  whole without expressed written consent from Amy Cox a.k.a. Cat
  Mason.
  This is a work of Fiction.  All characters, organizations, brands, and
  events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a
  fictitious manner.  Any resemblance to actual events, or persons living
  or deceased is completely coincidental.
  Copyright © Cat Mason Books 2016
  First Publication: April 2016
  Cover Image and Design By: Indievention Designs
  Editing By: Asli Fratarcangeli
  
   
   
   
   
  
  Prologue
  Flower Pluckin’ and Heartbreak
  Ireland
  My entire life, up to this point, I have spent fantasizing how this
  moment would play out. I planned to fall in love, just like in the movies
  I watch, to fill the empty hours. Every