Cat Marnell's Friends Are Nervous That She Now Has $500,000 To Buy Drugs With

Enabling! What does it mean?! Are we all doing it?! Or, as we all remember from the iconic bedtime story of our childhood: If you give a mouse a cookie, it might overdose on heroin.

As we’ve previously mentioned, it’s hard not to feel weird about reading and enjoying the oeuvre of substance abuser/girl-about-town and former XOJane beauty blogger Cat Marnell, who writes (high) with bracing, unapologetic fuck-itness about her drug and alcohol addiction while she’s doing beauty experiments like bleaching her eyebrows.

She also has some interesting thoughts about being a female addict (from her infamous Vice interview: “I’m going to tell you right now that there is a voice that comes out in me when I write for Jane that says “I’m getting better,” like all reassuringly, which caters to women-and I do it without realizing it. Sometimes it’s true. But I’m really not planning on getting better. It’s like everyone is always encouraging my recovery. Women do it in real life and online. So I often write in this fake way that reflects that, that I’m on that track. It’s weird”) from a perspective you rarely hear. Out loud, anyway.

Anyway, she just got a huge book deal from Simon and Schuster for a memoir called How To Murder Your Life, and her friends are worried she’s going to spend it all on crank, reports Radar Online:

“She got a $500,000 deal with about a third of it up front, and as everyone knows, it is really dangerous to give an addict that much money… Cat has already been seriously tempted to go off the rails and go crazy because everyone is super excited about the book,” reveals the insider. “Her agent did have to convince everyone that she’s as straight as she’s ever been, her deal definitely got some people nervous that she wasn’t going to be clean enough.”

“She’s saved all the sex stuff for the book, when you’re a really druggy person, the last thing you want to do is write about your sex life, because it’s not happy stuff. It is sad and you black out in the middle of it.”

“She is definitely planning on writing parts of the book while she is high,” the pal says. “Cat has never written anything sober! Despite what she says about learning to write sober, she really doubts her abilities to do anything without tons of Adderall.

Some of the fascination that surrounds Marnell among writer types is certainly self-reflective. I can say with confidence that, while it’s not really discussed openly, women who write for the Internet (myself very much included) hit the sauce more than they should, and reading Marnell’s writing is like looking into a funhouse mirror of addiction-as-branding.

‘Would You Give A Junkie $500k? Pals Concerned Over Cat Marnell’s Mega Book Deal’ [Radar Online]