"Ms. Marnell turned the tropes of women’s magazine writing upside down, with stories like 'The Art of Crack-tractiveness: How to Look and Feel Hot on No Sleep'..."

"... which offered tips like 'Brush your teeth!' along with a how-to guide to real beauty products for fellow partyers who might, like Ms. Marnell, have spent the night in a warehouse, as she wrote, with a 'bunch of U.K. dustheads for five straight hours.' It was irresistible, and also appalling, and the internet tied itself up in knots debating Ms. Marnell’s honesty, talent, authenticity and narcissism, along with the exploitative and enabling behavior of her many bosses. Naturally, she got a book deal and a half-million dollar advance from Simon & Schuster."

From a NYT piece, "Cat Marnell, a Former Beauty Editor, on Her New Addiction Memoir."

There's a big interview with the woman, whose "hair fell out a few years ago." (She has many wigs.) She was smoking furiously and drinking a lot of coffee, then switching to wine.

I’ve just finished reading your book, which is harrowing, so I’m a little shaken.

Dude, that was four years ago. I have everything now but hair, though I’m not in recovery and I’m not clean. People are like, “Is it so brave to tell everything?” I’m like, “No.” For me, being brave would be being in a program and getting clean, instead of “I found a way to talk about my problems ad nauseam and somehow get paid for it.” Not that I want to reduce what I’ve accomplished. I want to say good things.

The interviewer is female, by the way. Penelope Green.

Here's the book: "How to Murder Your Life."

She does have an amusing writing style. You might think only other addicts would want to read about excessive drug use, but I think it all depends on the quality of the writing. You don't have to be an addict to like reading "Naked Lunch" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." But that's the male addict point of view and set of experiences. Marnell is telling us about being a "party girl" in NYC, loving fashion magazines — "I wanted to huff Anna Wintour" — and all that makeup.

And an obsession with aging:

"How feminist blogs like Jezebel gin up page views by exploiting women's worst tendencies."

Emily Gould in Slate:

As of this writing, [last week's Jezebel post titled "The Daily Show's Woman Problem"] has generated almost 1,000 comments and nearly 90,000 page views. It's a prime example of the feminist blogosphere's tendency to tap into the market force of what I've come to think of as "outrage world"—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like Jezebel and also, to a lesser degree, Slate's own XX Factor and Salon's Broadsheet. 

Ha. A lesser degree. Hidden question: How can we get those page views?

They're ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism. These firestorms are great for page-view-pimping bloggy business. But they promote the exact opposite of progressive thought and rational discourse, and the comment wars they elicit almost inevitably devolve into didactic one-upsmanship and faux-feminist cliché. The vibe is less sisterhood-is-powerful than middle-school clique in-fight, with anyone who dares to step outside of chalk-drawn lines delimiting what's "empowering" and "anti-feminist" inevitably getting flamed and shamed to bits. 

Consider the radical idea that women are human beings.