Literary wild child Cat Marnell has sold her first novel, Page Six is told.
The beauty writer who became something of a sensation after the release of 2016’s hit addiction memoir “How to Murder Your Life” will release “The Bored and the Beautiful” with Crown Publishing.
“My memoir reads like an afternoon tea with grandma by comparison,” she told us.
“The Bored and the Beautiful is way crazier,” she says, describing the new work as a “wild, druggy, funny, feminine, deranged, glamorous, and, yes, autobiographical novel about my character’s media-famous thirties.”
Marnell first made a name for herself as a beauty editor for Conde Nast’s now defunct Lucky magazine before moving on to write a column for Jane Pratt’s XOJane.
In 2012, she parted ways with the web site after refusing to stay clean, going out in flames by defiantly telling Page Six at the time: “I’m always on drugs. Look, I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends.”
An announcement on Publishers Marketplace describes the plot of the upcoming book as “following a young woman in 2010’s New York City who rubs shoulders with the elite social world of downtown, writes for the hottest pop culture outlets, falls for the wrong men, and learns what it means to be wanted for her talent, her beauty and her destruction – before finally choosing herself.”
The book is slated to come out some time in 2027. Crown is a subsidiary of Penguin Random House.
“I indulged every creative impulse crafting my dream book,” Marnell told us. “It’s chick lit noir, it’s my beautiful dark twisted fantasy.”
A rep for Crown tells us the book is “a fantastic snapshot of a very specific time in New York City, through the eyes of a character who has the world at her fingertips while so painfully aware it’s the result of the media loving a damsel in distress.”
UTA literary agent Byrd Leavell tells us: “Cat’s commitment to this novel has been incredible to witness. She has poured every ounce of her prodigious talent into draft after draft of a story about a downtown writer with a tabloid presence, a narcotics habit, and an uncanny ability to make New York feel like a magic trick performed just for her. It is going to rip your heart of your chest and cement her as one of our generation’s best writers.”