[2] Combining memoir with critical enquiry, Martin's major forthcoming book, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind, promises to be an intimate, insightful, and helpful depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction.
[6] In How to Sell, he portrays the luxury business as being one of exquisite vulgarity and outrageous fraud, finding in it a metaphor for the American soul at work.
[2][3] Martin has also won a German Academic Exchange Service Fellowship and is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine.
His father Bill was a type 1 diabetic, and a successful real estate developer in Toronto and Calgary, Canada.
Bill became involved in New Age spirituality, founding a "Church of Living Love" in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1976.