Marcy Dermansky Books in Order

If you want her first, coming-of-age novel: Twins
If you like impulsive antiheroines and dark comedy: Bad Marie → The Red Car
If you want rich-people satire and relationship chaos: Very Nice → Hot Air
If you prefer disaster, menace, and gallows humor: Hurricane Girl

Marcy Dermansky was born in New York City and raised in Englewood, New Jersey. That mix of suburbia, restlessness, and nearness to the city runs through her fiction, where people often want to blow up their lives without quite knowing what comes next.

She studied at Haverford College, then earned a Master of Arts at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Before her novels found an audience, she worked office jobs, later reshaping her schedule around graduate school and part-time work so she could write seriously. That practical, make-the-hours-where-you-can route to fiction feels very much in step with the books she went on to publish.

Her debut novel, Twins, came out in 2005 and was picked as a New York Times Editors' Choice. It follows identical sisters Chloe and Sue from early adolescence into the rougher parts of growing up, and it announced some of Dermansky's signatures right away: alternating voices, dry humor, emotional volatility, and girls who are both vulnerable and a little scary.

Then came Bad Marie, and everything got messier.

Marie is an ex-con who takes a nanny job and then runs off with a child and the child's father, and Dermansky somehow makes the whole thing funny, tense, and oddly tender at once. Bad Marie became a Barnes and Noble Discover selection and a finalist in the Morning News Tournament of Books. Readers who click with her work usually like that balance. The sentences are clean and fast, but underneath them are questions about class, desire, money, power, and what happens when somebody wants a different life immediately.

The Red Car brought in grief and a faint surreal shimmer, and it was later named a New York Times Editors' Choice as well as a best book of the year in several places. Very Nice turned toward wealthy Connecticut households, MFA-world absurdity, and a mother-daughter-professor tangle. Hurricane Girl followed a woman whose beach-house fantasy is flattened by a storm, then by a series of terrible decisions. In Hot Air, published in 2025, a billionaire crashes a hot-air balloon into a swimming pool during an awkward first date, which is a pretty good example of how quickly Dermansky likes to throw order off balance.

Chaos is one of her tools.

Across the novels, you see recurring interests: women on the verge, suburban unease, sexual politics, dark comedy, and characters who drift until something strange jolts them awake. Her settings matter, too. New Jersey, New York, beach towns, borrowed mansions, cars, pools, and roads are never just scenery. They are usually part of the trap, or part of the escape. Many readers come to her for slim novels they can finish quickly, then keep thinking about afterward.

Outside the novels, Dermansky's short fiction has appeared in places like McSweeney's, Guernica, The Indiana Review, and Lenny Letter, and her essay Maybe I Loved You was included in the anthology Goodbye to All That. She has received fellowships from MacDowell and the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and she won the Smallmouth Press Andre Dubus Novella Award and the Story Magazine Carson McCullers short story prize. She has also worked as an editor and writing coach, and has written plainly about editing other people's novels from home while making room for her own.

She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her daughter. After years spent in New York, she returned to her home state, and that return feels useful when you read her work. These are sharp, compact novels about people who think they can improvise their way to freedom, and sometimes, for a page or two, they almost can.