HH by CC Episode 6: An Ode to Cat Marnell, Part 2

HH by CC Episode 6: An Ode to Cat Marnell, Part 2

Cat! Marnell! Blocked me! on Twitter!!!!!!!! I'm not mad about it anymore, I just think it's a perfect cliffhanger for Part One and lede for Part Two. Riveting internet-pop-culture drama, ya know?

I can't even remember what I tweeted that made Cat do it, but I can promise you it wasn't mean. What I do know that tweet included was a comparison to Elizabeth Wurtzel and if you only take one thing away from this Episode of Heart History, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE WITH CAT MARNELL THAT I DID.

Cat Marnell had been so nice to me online during the two years after she followed me back on Instagram, right up until the moment that she blocked me. If I had to guess as specifically as possible: I tweeted something along the lines of: How to Murder Your Life and More, Now Again are the two best memoirs about Adderall addiction.

Which is true. You can't say I wasn't tweeting straight facts. But what I didn't know what that when Cat was my age and admired Elizabeth the way I now admire Cat, Elizabeth had been very rude. To give you a timeline, Elizabeth Wurtzel died last year of breast cancer at age 52. Cat is turning 40 next year and I'll be 30 in ten months. I'm 29 now. I wonder who will be the next lady-writer to pick of the mantle of unhinged drug abuse in downtown New York City?

But rewind to before I got myself fucking BLOCKED. The week that Natalie's article came out I was losing my mind. I felt deeply uncool because the whole internet was laughing at how evil I am and even more than that... How do you hold onto an idea of yourself as good when the whole world thinks you're bad?

How do you validate your experience with addiction when your addiction has been scrubbed from the public record in order to make you look like the most one-dimensional villain possible?

How do you keep staying alive?

Drugs, uh, was the answer that I came up with. I'm not proud of this, but it's the truth. And I was going through a lot that week. Two days after Natalie took credit for my fame, I found out that my Dad had committed suicide.

The kind of depression that kills is heredity and we know this because of science as well as anecdotal evidence. We all know that Ernest Hemingway shot himself in the head, but did you know that his younger brother did that, too? I'm not mad about my DNA. One of the greatest mercies of inheriting chronic, suicidal depression from my Dad is that I don't blame him for killing himself. I'm never like, BUT WHY????!? Bitch, I know why! I almost did the same thing and I'll consider it a real triumph of modern mental healthcare if I die at a ripe old age of natural causes! In my sleep and not because of sleeping pills.

The more or less non-stop bender I was on for the ten days after NatalieGate included all of the reasonable drugs except for Adderall. By this I mean no heroin, no opioids, no meth, no crack cocaine. These are unreasonably addictive chemicals. Also no poppers because I don't know what they are and I fucking FEAR the unknown. Double also: I'm afraid of nicotine although the smell of cigarettes reminds me of Europe the way cinnamon reminds me of Christmas. I'd never eat anything with cinnamon on it, but I get a chuckling, nostalgic kick out of being around people who do.

That leaves alcohol, weed, acid, mushrooms, and cocaine, although those particular ten days are what taught me that I probably shouldn't be doing cocaine going forward because it's an upper with a bright, soaring, manic high way too similar to Adderall. And in addition to drugs during those ten days I also relied on people to distract me from  being Caroline Calloway. The boys at the Harvard Lampoon Castle in the other Cambridge helped me out a lot and also the Red Scare girls and so did Cat Marnell.

Cat told me two things that I will never forget: "You need to keep exercising during this period of extreme stress. One hour a day will affect the other 23 hours of your day." The second thing: "Be nice to everyone. Be so nice to everyone that they come away thinking, Wow that Caroline Calloway girl is actually so sweet in person!" I'm paraphrasing, but these two sentiments really stuck with me and probably will forever more. What was unsaid, but I chose to see unspoken in her advice was this: I've been through periods of extreme stress and I survived and people have made assumptions about my personality, but it's possible to change their minds. You'll get through this and you'll change peoples' minds.

When I got these dm's from Cat I was tripping on acid in a bathroom stall at Nowadays. I had ducked away from my friends because dm-ing Cat on Instagram seemed a billion times more glamorous than dancing. Cat mentioned that she had to go, but that someone she was with at a club on the other side of the world in London knew me. Mutual acquaintances already! When I found my friends again they were outside drinking beers in the garden under fairy lights that really fucking did things for my brain on acid. My friend Ajay had run into a group of people I didn't know, but when I introduced myself one of the strangers cut me off. "I'm Caroline--" "From The Cut," he laughed. I took a deep breath and made plans to exercise tomorrow and was nice.

Fast forward a couple months later and now I'm getting myself fucking BLOCKED on Twitter and sending out a goddamn BAT SIGNAL to all my followers on all platforms asking them to ask Cat to unblock me. My followers came through and miracles are real. A couple months after that and Cat is swooping in with her kindness again when I felt small.

Byrd, our formerly shared literary agent had just released an interview where he said this:

###

“I’ve done a lot of other wonderful books that I’m very proud of,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, “one more sort of contentious question. How much are you ‘allowed’ to talk about the deal with Caroline?”

Leavell didn’t hold back: “That was someone who made it past our system at the time, wound up in a room with me, and then I was presented with this proposal that I thought she had written,” he said.

“You know, right away you knew there was something there. We went out to editors and she kind of did the social media thing, the whole dog-and-pony show. And we got the deal.”

“Then it quickly became apparent that Caroline was essentially struggling. She was clearly on way too much A.D.D. medication and just all that. She was deeply unwell, deeply dishonest. As an agent, it’s very tricky because there’s no filter, and you end up linked to these people.”

“It was awful,” he continued. “I just wanted her to write the book, but she was never in a place where she could begin to write that book. It was more important to her to be seen as an author than it was to be an author. She didn’t know how to be an author…I feel bad for everyone involved, certainly for Flatiron, which bought the book.”

After my conversation with Leavell, I reached out to Caroline Calloway for a comment. She has yet to reply.

###

"Deeply unwell, deeply dishonest." Wow. In the beginning of the interview Byrd even claims that Cat was flat broke and begging him to loan her money. I sent her the link like, "Damn this hurts my feelings." She wrote back immediately like, "I just yelled at Byrd and told him not to be so mean!!!!!! Plus I wouldn't take this interview too seriously because I've never borrowed money from Byrd so I don't know why this interview is talking about things that never happened lmao."

A few weeks after that, I finished my Natalie response, "I Am Caroline Calloway" and raised $50,000 for doctors on the frontlines of covid and Byrd emailed this out of the blue to my manager:

[screenshot of Byrd email] "It is *hugely* frustrating to me to keep appearing in this mutually beneficial back-and-forth between her and Natalie. The cut piece was a fiasco for me and has caused lasting harm. This said, please tell CC that I was so tremendously pleased to see that she is now clean. And that she wrote the hell out of the chapters she posted. I was wrong. She is a huge talent and she has it in her to to a wonderful book."

"I was wrong." "She is a huge talent and she has it in her to do a wonderful book." "I was wrong."

I treasure this email like a digital rosary and I count the beads of it over and over again. I was wrong! She is a huge talent and she has it in her to do a wonderful book! Did Byrd say this because you know, I, um... Finally produced a huge chunk of critically acclaimed and financially fruitful writing by myself, no ghost-writer, on iamcarolinecalloway.com? Or did Cat standing up for me have something to do with this? I think it's not either or, but both. Over the past year, trolls have often quoted Byrd's interview at me ("deeply dishonest, deeply unwell") and this email from him that I've never shared until now has been my private shield against the way people try to weaponize Byrd's words against me. "Wrong." "Wonderful book. "Huge talent."

For years whenever something reminded me of Cat, I thought: I got to meet this woman someday! So when The Drunken Canal wanted to do a profile on me thought: Wait! No! This could be my chance! I parried and pitched them instead a profile of Cat by me, really more of a meeting of the minds than an interview because meeting her was the only thing I wanted out of all of this, and Gutes and Claire loved it, and I embarrassed myself pretty much as soon as Cat joined the Zoom call. How did I embarrass myself? Lol just read the part about razor blades in this full transcript of the interview. In my defense, I had started drinking Aperol Spritzes around 3 PM. Slowly—of course! I didn’t want to be fucking black-out! But like… I also didn’t want to be my actual personality, which was pure nerves. The consequence of this choice was that during my first meeting with Cat Marnell, I was confident and dumb. No fears, brain smooth!

We talked for almost three hours and The Drunken Canal edited it down to just one full-sized newspaper page. A lot of what we talked about what off the record and I will absolutely honor that budding trust with Cat over spilling dumb fucking tea on Patreon. But broad, respectful strokes: We talked about family problems and our movie deals and  the actresses who will be playing us and what it's like to be friends with them. (It's stupidly awesome.) Particularly vivid memories that stand out to me: Cat explaining how rude Elizabeth Wurtzel had been to her when Cat was my age (late twenties) and looked up to Elizabeth the way I look up to Cat now. Me responding with: "That's so weird. Elizabeth Wurtzel is always so nice to me in my daydreams," hearing how it sounded and wishing I had drank fewer Aperol Spritzes. It struck me over and over again how skinny and fit she was. Like, this woman is about to turn forty and she has the figure of a run-way model! Kate Moss WHO! Oh, and I remember that Cat had the most perfect, brilliant verb for describing when you're out-of-your-mind-high on Adderall and spend weeks at a time curled up in your apartment, absorbed in projects that feel like they will change the world, but in reality are more along the lines of re-organizing your iTunes Library: Hamstering. Hamstering! Do you love it? Sometimes I still get a little hamstery, surrounded my piles of paper of cut-up Dreamer Bbs on the floor, just because it reminds me of those years.

The only time I got scared during our call was when we talked about attachment styles and it became very clear to me that unless we become the most evolved versions of ourselves, Cat and I are not destined to get along. She's an avoidant attachment type. I'm an anxious attachment type. Besides the fact that we are two of the most similar people in the world in terms of cultural legacy, we snap into each other emotionally like puzzle pieces for disaster. I hope I can grow into the kind of lady who doesn't disgust Cat with my neediness and more importantly: Can still hold myself in high regard even if I do.

My favorite thing that Cat always says in interviews is when she abbreviates the title of her book and says, "Murder almost killed me." So dark! So staccato and sequined and mysterious! She said it live for me during our interview on Zoom. It was heaven. I've read those words of hers so many times said to other people that having her finally say it to my face was like hearing you favorite song performed live. I grew up to that melody! "Murder almost killed me" was my favorite song in college.

The End!