These days, Cat Marnell wakes up at 9 a.m. — “early for me,” she said.

She had been providing examples of her reformed life , including that she does Pilates videos on YouTube and sleeps every night, “for, like, a long time.” She was sitting atop a picnic table in an empty private courtyard in Alphabet City, an impromptu interview setting she landed on after an hourlong, failed search for the treehouse where she used to smoke angel dust.

That was the old Cat Marnell, which she chronicled in her best-selling 2017 memoir, “How to Murder Your Life.” The book showed her juggling an intense career as an up-and-coming magazine writer (at Lucky, xoJane, Vice) with an even more intense dependency on prescription pills; in defiance of other hard-partying confessionals, she didn’t pretend to have conquered her addictions by the end. After she finished this anti-recovery memoir, she hit rock bottom. That’s where her latest project, an Audible Original audiobook called “ Self-Tanner for the Soul,” picks up.

“It’s said that you can’t run away from your problems,” Marnell, 37, said into a microphone in Audible’s Newark studios in July, wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant dress, her black eyeliner thick, her wig platinum. She was reading aloud from the diary she kept during her two-year solo tour of the youth hostels, all-night supermarkets and grimy public beaches of Europe and Asia. “But guess what, babes? Untrue. Of course you can. You can do it fabulously.”

Back in June 2017, when she impulse-bought a one-way ticket from J.F.K. to Lisbon — the first of several flights she would miss — the problems she had to run away from were many. She had achieved a kind of downtown Manhattan notoriety writing articles with headlines like “The Cockroach and the Cokehead” and “Trippy Terror Tuesday: Fantastic Hemp-Based Beauty for Vaguely Consensual + Very Stoned Hippie Sex Cult Orgies,” all in deliciously strung-out prose.