Congrats on the audiobook. I just finished listening today.

Thanks, thanks. Don’t you just find diaries so interesting? They can be so mundane, but I find them very appealing in that way. I’ve kept journals in the past but they were so ridiculous. And inconsistent. This was sort of inspired by Andy Cohen’s diaries. And The Andy Warhol Diaries, which was my favourite book in my twenties.

For this, I just wrote on the train. At the cafe. In my notebook and then I’d photograph the page and send it to myself. I liked being able to write it anywhere. Because I had loopy bad experiences writing my book. Every day, I felt like I’d just gotten off an airplane. I was crunched up, scrunched over. I was miserable. I was over it. And that’s not good for your life when you have to write that book for two years. This gave me a feeling of freedom.

And what about the title, where did that come from?

Well, I didn’t want to do self-help. I had met with Audible at a fabulous little bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel here in New York and it was a horrible time in my life. I was wearing a bad clown wig. It was really bad. I mean, when you’re wearing a coloured wig and you’re not combing it because you’re fucked, it’s a very bad situation. So, I was sitting there in the subway after the meeting, about to cry, wearing a rainbow wig, and I was like I can’t write self-help. Because that was what was suggested to me, because I had this self-help title Self Tanner For The Soul, which comes from my beauty background, you know, and I love self-care.

But what I really just wanted to do was run away from problems. And in doing so it turned into the solution. OK, I wouldn’t say the solution, but it turned into a way of hope. I don’t have the best coping skills, but I do have the most interesting life.

Cat Marnell talks affirmations, adderall and crying in the subway