At The Millions, Emily St. John Mandel considers unsympathetic characters in John Updike’s Rabbit series, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, and Bad Marie.”I’m filled with admiration for the work,” she writes.

[Bad Marie] is a fast, fearless little book about a woman who does very bad things. Marie is supremely conniving. [...] By any rational measure, this is not a pleasant person. Marie is vengeful, and she’s unsophisticated—her main complaint about France is that they speak so much French over there—but she has a talent for survival, and I found that I adored her. More than that, I found her refreshing.

Read the entire essay.

Northern New Jersey newspaper The Record featured Marcy and Bad Marie on the cover of the arts section today, answering the question: “How did this young woman who grew up in Englewood make this leap – from human resources to feted novelist?”

In an article on “nanny novels,” the New York Times‘ Felicia Lee featured Marcy, her daughter Nina, and Bad Marie, along with writers Mona Simpson and Victoria Brown. The story also ran in the International Herald Tribune.

“Envy is something I’m interested in, in general,” said Ms. Dermansky, interviewed in her home in the Astoria section of Queens, where she lives with her husband and daughter, Nina. “There’s always a house that’s better to play at, someone who has better toys.”

Because of their flexible schedules as writers, Ms. Dermansky and her husband only occasionally rely on a baby sitter to look after their daughter, now 11 months old. Employing a nanny, she said, is “a tricky thing to do” for all the usual reasons.

“I’m not against it,” she added, “but I feel lucky with my life right now.”

Read the entire article.

Marcy shares her Bad Marie playlist with Largehearted Boy:

I did not listen to Scarlett Johansson’s Anywhere I Lay My Head just a little bit. Scarlett is ingrained in my brain. Bad Marie is not a long novel, just over 240 pages, but I probably wrote over 100 new pages with the album on repeat.

Marcy’s article about taking her daughter Nina to a “Mommy and Me” screening at the Landmark Sunshine Theater was published in Film in Focus. Here’s how it begins:

My daughter Nina, seven months old, sitting on my lap, started talking excitedly to the big screen in front of her.

“Doy doy doy doy doo doo,” she said with enormous enthusiasm — or something very much like it. We were watching Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus at the Landmark Sunshine Theater in Manhattan, a Wednesday matinee in their weekly Rattle and Reel screening series for parents and babies. I looked around nervously, afraid that Nina was making too much noise.