Author: Cat Marnell Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1476752419 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author and former beauty editor Cat Marnell, a “vivid, maddening, heartbreaking, very funny, chaotic” (The New York Times) memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs. At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America—and that’s all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret life. She was a prescription drug addict. She was also a “doctor shopper” who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills; a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods; a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets; a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything—anything—to sleep. This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep school—and with a prescription for the Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnell’s amphetamine-fueled rise from intern to editor through the beauty departments of NYLON, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky. We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. From the Condé Nast building to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell “treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty.…with the skill of a pulp novelist” (The New York Times Book Review) what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no. Combining “all the intoxicating intrigue of a thriller and yet all the sobering pathos of a gifted writer’s true-life journey to recover her former health, happiness, ambitions, and identity” (Harper’s Bazaar), How to Murder Your Life is mesmerizing, revelatory, and necessary.
Author: Alana Massey Publisher: Hachette UK ISBN: 1455565873 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
"Alana Massey's prose is to brutal honesty what a mandolin is to a butter knife: she's sharper; she slices thinner; she shows the cross-section of a truth so deftly--so powerfully and cannily--it's hard to look away, and hard not to feel that something has shifted in you for having read her." -- Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams From columnist and critic Alana Massey, a collection of essays examining the intersection of the personal with pop culture through the lives of pivotal female figures--from Sylvia Plath to Britney Spears--in the spirit of Chuck Klosterman, with the heart of a true fan. Mixing Didion's affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard. But it is, above all, a paean to the celebrities who have shaped a generation of women--from Scarlett Johansson to Amber Rose, Lil' Kim, Anjelica Huston, Lana Del Rey, Anna Nicole Smith and many more. These reflections aim to reimagine these women's legacies, and in the process, teach us new ways of forgiving ourselves.
Author: Erica C. Barnett Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0525522344 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
"Barnett's prose style is brassy and cleareyed, with echoes of Anne Lamott." --Beth Macy, The New York Times Book Review "Emotionally devastating and self-aware, this cautionary tale about substance abuse is a worthy heir to Cat Marnell's How to Murder Your Life." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) A startlingly frank memoir of one woman's struggles with alcoholism and recovery, with essential new insights into addiction and treatment Erica C. Barnett had her first sip of alcohol when she was thirteen, and she quickly developed a taste for drinking to oblivion with her friends. In her late twenties, her addiction became inescapable. Volatile relationships, blackouts, and unsuccessful stints in detox defined her life, with the bottles she hid throughout her apartment and offices acting as both her tormentors and closest friends. By the time she was in her late thirties, Barnett had quit and relapsed again and again, but found herself far from rehabilitated. "Rock bottom," Erica Barnett writes, "is a lie." It is always possible, she learned, to go lower than your lowest point. She found that the terms other alcoholics used to describe the trajectory of their addiction--"rock bottom" and "moment of clarity"--and the mottos touted by Alcoholics Anonymous, such as "let go and let God"--didn't correspond to her experience and could actually be detrimental. With remarkably brave and vulnerable writing, Barnett expands on her personal story to confront the dire state of addiction in America, the rise of alcoholism in American women in the last century, and the lack of rehabilitation options available to addicts. At a time when opioid addiction is a national epidemic and one in twelve Americans suffers from alcohol abuse disorder, Quitter is indispensable reading for our age and an ultimately hopeful story of Barnett's own hard-fought path to sobriety.
Author: Maggie Ford Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1473501032 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 464
Book Description
Will she ever be anything more than an East End girl? Cissy Farmer longs to escape her life in London's Docklands where times are hard and money is tight. And when she meets the debonair Langley Makepeace, her dream seems within reach. But the price of belonging in Langley's brittle, sophisticated world could be much higher than Cissy ever imagined. Torn between Langley and her gentle childhood sweetheart, Eddie Bennet, she is forced to gamble on her future chance of happiness, a decision that will change her life forever... From the author of A Girl in Wartime and A Soldier’s Girl
Author: Kristen Johnston Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1451635060 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
The actress best known for her work on "3rd Rock from the Sun" traces the story of her career and the personal difficulties that challenged her after "3rd Rock" ended.
Author: Jean Godfrey-June Publisher: Crown ISBN: 0307346064 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
Everybody loves beauty products. Even if you think you know nothing about them, or even if you think you hate them, you actually know plenty about them and, in fact, have several of them that you love. You have major opinions that lie barely beneath the surface. Women whomodestly/moralistically claim to “never use all that beauty stuff” are big Clinique ladies, usually with a healthy helping of Neutrogena. —Free Gift with Purchase From the beloved beauty editor of Lucky magazine comes a dishy, charming, and insightful memoir of an unlikely career. Combining the personal stories of a quirky tomboy who found herself in the inner circle of the beauty world with priceless makeup tips (Is there really a perfect red lipstick out there for everyone? Which miracle skin potion actually works?), Jean Godfrey-June takes us behind the scenes to a world of glamour, fashion, and celebrity. Godfrey-June’s funny, smart, outsider perspective on beauty has set her apart since she first started writing her popular “Godfrey’s Guide” column for Elle magazine. In Free Gift with Purchase, she invites us into the absurd excess of the offices, closets, and medicine cabinets of beauty editors. From shelves upon shelves of face lotion, conditioner, lipstick, eye cream, wrinkle reducers, and perfume to thoroughly disturbing “acne breakfasts” and “cellulite lunches”; from the lows (a makeover from hell, getting pedicure tips from porn stars) to the highs (the glamour of the fashion shows in Paris, lounging in bed with Tom Ford, a flight on Donald Trump’s private jet, and landing her dream job at Lucky magazine), we see it all. Like a friend sharing the details of her incredibly cool job, Jean lets us in on the lessons she’s learned along the way, about the eternal search for the right haircut and the perfect lip gloss, of course—but more important, about what her job has meant to her and why she loves what she does, blemishes and all.
Author: Lisa F. Smith Publisher: SelectBooks, Inc. ISBN: 1590793129 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 219
Book Description
Lisa Smith was a bright, young lawyer at a prestigious firm in NYC in the early nineties when alcoholism started to take over her life. What was once a way of escaping her insecurity and negativity became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is Smith's darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story of her formative years, the decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. Smith describes how her spiraling circumstances conspired with her predisposition to depression and self-medication, nurturing an environment ripe for addiction to flourish. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism. Beneath the façade of success lies the reality of addiction.
Author: Erica Garza Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1501163388 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
“Erica Garza has written a riveting, can’t-look-away memoir of a life lived hardcore…In an era when predatory male sexual behavior has finally become a topic of urgent national discourse…Getting Off makes for a wild, timely read” (Elle). A fixation on porn and orgasm, strings of failed relationships and serial hook-ups with strangers, inevitable blackouts to blunt the shame—these are not things we often hear women share publicly, and not with the candor, eloquence, and introspection Erica Garza brings to Getting Off. What sets this courageous and riveting account apart from your typical misery memoir is the absence of any precipitating trauma beyond the garden variety of hurt we’ve all had to endure in simply becoming a person—reckoning with family, learning to be social, integrating what it means to be sexual. Whatever tenor of violence or abuse Erica’s life took on through her behavior was of her own making, fueled by fear, guilt, self-loathing, self-pity, loneliness, and the hopelessness those feelings brought on as she runs from one side of the world to the other in an effort to break her habits—from East Los Angeles to Hawaii and Southeast Asia, through the brothels of Bangkok and the yoga studios of Bali to disappointing stabs at therapy and twelve-steps back home. In these remarkable pages, Garza draws an evocative, studied portrait of the anxiety that fuels her obsessions, as well as the exhilaration and hope she begins to feel when she suspects she might be free of them. Getting Off offers a brave and necessary voice to our evolving conversations about addiction and the impact that internet culture has had on us all—“a profoundly genuine, gripping story that any reader can appreciate” (Vice). “In reading Garza’s insight into her own experiences, we better understand ourselves” (The New York Times Book Review).
Author: Deborah Spungen Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 0307807436 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
“Honest and moving . . . Her painful tale is engrossing.”—Washington Post Book World For most of us, it was just another horrible headline. But for Deborah Spungen, the mother of Nancy, who was stabbed to death at the Chelsea Hotel, it was both a relief and a tragedy. Here is the incredible story of an infant who never stopped screaming, a toddler who attacked people, a teenager addicted to drugs, violence, and easy sex, a daughter completely out of control—who almost destroyed her parents’ marriage and the happiness of the rest of her family.
Author: Lesley Arfin Publisher: Vice Books ISBN: 9781576873830 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
Lesley Arfin kept a diary during the apocalypse that was her adolescence, chronicling her depression from being bullied in the 10th grade and her discovery of heroin. Lesley told her diary everything. Now in her 20s, Lesley has returned to her journal and added new comments that only an adult looking back on their own life can perceive. Most of these are in the vein of What the hell was I talking about?' Lesley's hilarious updates remind readers how heavy it all seemed back then and how irrelevant it all really is in the face of adulthood.'
Author: Cat Marnell
Author: Alana Massey
Author: Erica C. Barnett
Author: Maggie Ford
Author: Kristen Johnston
Author: Jean Godfrey-June
Author: Lisa F. Smith
Author: Erica Garza
Author: Deborah Spungen
Author: Lesley Arfin