One Nightstand With Cat Cohen

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us in the blond at 11 Howard to discuss four of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Cat Cohen’s art is unabashedly confessionalist. Working across mediums — as in her latest comedy special, Come for Me; her poetry collection, God I Feel Modern Tonight; or songs like “can u send me that??” — Cohen always finds a way to draw from the most private, personal corners of her psyche. So is it any surprise that she likes reading about others’ secrets? “Reading and entering into other people’s twisted little worlds is the only thing that makes me feel less alone,” Cohen tells me in the weeks leading up to the release of her debut album, Overdressed. “I should do it more, but I also take comfort in an amazing website called TikTok.”

Naturally, the books she’s brought to discuss are all variations on this theme — starting with the seminal Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, which was the first book that really stirred something in Cohen. “As someone who, at that time, had never been kissed or looked at by a boy, I was like, ‘I need someone who gets me and how effed up my life is,’” Cohen says of her teenage obsession with the book’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield. “By the way, my life was perfect without flaw and I’m reading this book like, ‘This is just how stressed I am when my mom drives me to carpool!’”

While Cohen related to Caulfield, what she loved most about Donna Tartt’s The Secert History was encountering a group of college students whose lives couldn’t feel more foreign to her own. “I’m like, ‘Those freaky classics kids would never give me the time of day!’” she says. “I remember going to college and seeing the kids who’d gone to boarding school and being like, ‘I’m from Texas and I don't know anything you're talking about.”

If The Secret History’s troupe of gloomy nerds helped her understand some of her peers, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet truly broadened Cohen’s worldview. “‘Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror, just keep going. No feeling is final,’” she recites from the book. “I should have that tattooed on my forehead. When I had no idea what I wanted to do or what I would end up becoming, just being like, ‘OK, these feelings aren’t going to be forever,’ [really helps].”

Cohen’s final pick, Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life, is arguably the most salacious, secret-filled of them all. “Because I'm so uncool and could never stay out at the Le Bain doing angel dust [like Marnell], I'm always like, ‘What are the cool people doing?’” she says. “I want to read about their secret inner lives.”

Below, you’ll find our full conversation with Cohen — where she reflects on feeling like an outsider; wanting to be Holden Caulfield, not date him; and her favorite book to give as a gift.