The Bored and the Beautiful

A downtown 'it' girl falls for an influential journalist who pushes her addiction issues with love, pills and headlines – to the breaking point, in the intoxicating and propulsive first novel from the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir How to Murder Your Life.

'A HELL OF A READ' RUMAAN ALAM

'PROPULSIVE AND ELECTRIC' LYNN STEGER STRONG

Meet Dizzy Calatrava: blonde, brilliant and perpetually one cigarette away from collapse. It’s 2012 and she’s a downtown writer with a tabloid presence, a narcotics habit and a tendency to treat New York City like her own private paradise. Unreliable yet unforgettable, Dizzy pops amphetamine pills like Tic Tacs, drifting between Thai rehabs and rooftop afterparties like a sorceress in platforms, narrating the apocalypse of her thirties in prose so sparkling you can feel it burn your nose.

When Dizzy meets Editor-In-Chief, a charming, fellow media personality whose bad behavior only helps his star rise, she wonders if perhaps she’s met her true match. But is this a tale of two kindred flames igniting, or is Dizzy flying too close to the sun? The Bored and the Beautiful is a dark, feminine and salacious glimpse into the mind of a lovable protagonist who you can’t help but root for as she makes every mistake you can imagine – and probably some you can’t.

Reviews

'What a thrill that Cat Marnell – one of our best living documentarians of addiction and the glamorous frivolities of New York – has at last given her fans a novel. The Bored and the Beautiful is so much more than a morality tale about drugs and disease, so much more than a time capsule about fashion and trend. This is a riveting portrait of the writer as a young woman, a book about the redemptive power of art itself, a hell of a read, a story that made me happy to be alive' Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind and Entitlement

'Cat Marnell is a wizard of the gorgeous and the abject at once. The Bored and the Beautiful is a story of glamour, grasping, loneliness, desire, addiction and wandering. Propulsive and electric, it is also the deeply human story of an artist finding herself' Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want and Flight

'The survival diary of a girl on the scene, from New York to London, Thailand to Ibiza, and destinations in between. A treasure map of heartaches drawn by the capable hand of a writer who knows, The Bored and the Beautiful is the brilliant crystallization of possibilities realized, a tabloid-noir of glam and struggle, a triumph of glitter in the streets ‘where rats turn into stars!' Nico Walker, author of Cherry

Praise for How to Murder Your Life:

'Marnell recounts parties and drugs and sex in writing that mirrors the experience of being on drugs – sometimes fizzing … and, just as often, cold and blunt and brutal' Guardian

'Marnell is a great storyteller. Funny, with the clever hustler’s knack for an energetically spun tall tale, she has an upbeat tone that hardly falters, even when she recounts the most harrowing episodes of her life' New Yorker

'[Marnell's] memoir brims with 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