There’s some affectionate rivalry between two of journalism’s cult heroes, it seems.
Page Six hears that Jane Pratt has sold her memoir — but we’re told the Sassy legend said she didn’t care how much it went for, as long as it was more than the memoir of her one-time protege Cat Marnell.
We’re told Pratt’s tell-all did indeed fetch more than the half million than Marnell’s beloved “How To Murder Your Life” snagged in 2013. We reported in October that the former XOJane editor was shopping a book that would chronicle, among other things, her time at Conde Nast (including run-ins with Si Newhouse and Anna Wintour), her famous friendships with Courtney Love, Michael Stipe, Chloe Sevigny, Courteney Cox, Drew Barrymore and others, as well as private struggles she has faced.
Famed editor Jane Pratt has sold a memoir, Page Six has learned. Casey Steffens/The New York Times
We’re told Pratt has kidded that she didn’t care how much the book sold for, as long as it was more than her friend and former employee Cat Marnell’s. Instagram/@cat_marnell
Sources say that its been snapped up by one of the “Big Five” publishing houses.
Marnell told us, “I hope she gets buckets of cash and encourage her to trash me in the memoir. I was a menace.” “I came into work with the ‘dust stutters’ from smoking PCP and half my face paraylzed,” she added, “I berated hard-working underlings and stole Jane’s magazines when I was high on Adderall. There is no way I wasn’t her worst employee ever.”
Marnell began her rise to infamy as the beauty editor of XOJane, Pratt’s first digital enterprise after her successes with Sassy and Jane magazines.
Marnell remains close with her one-time editor. Instagram/@cat_marnell
Pratt’s now working on her newsletter and website, Another Jane Pratt Thing. Casey Steffens/The New York Times
After chronicling her volatile lifestyle and drug use on the site, power agent Byrd Leavell sold Marnell’s memoir to Simon & Schuster for $500,000 in a bidding war, according to reports. (Marnell also sold her forthcoming debut novel, “The Bored and the Beautiful,” to Crown in October 2025).
Pratt founded beloved feminist teen magazine Sassy at 24 years old, and launched much-missed Jane magazine in 1997, part of Newhouse’s Condé Nast empire. After XOJane, she launched her current project, Another Jane Pratt Thing.