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DOUBLE TROUBLE: HAVERFORD ALUM’S FIRST NOVEL, TWINS,
TELLS A TWISTED COMING-OF-AGE TALE
The budding novelist in Marcy Dermansky '91 landed
her in trouble with her fourth-grade teacher when her 20-page epic
about her standard poodle was deemed too long for the class book-binding
project. “My teacher told me to handwrite it,” she recalls,
“because otherwise it was going to be too much work for her.”
Imagine if that teacher had been presented with Dermansky’s
latest work: her first novel, Twins, the 295-page saga
of adolescent sisters which was released by William Morrow in early
September. As the book opens, the title protagonists, Chloe and
Sue, are turning 13 and offering vastly different perspectives on
their relationship. Defiant, manic Sue is obsessed with maintaining
her longtime closeness with Chloe: “She was the better twin.
She had the better name, and I was desperate to hold on to her.”
Chloe, whose voice alternates chapters with Sue’s, is making
new friends and striving toward independence, and is tired of being
defined by her twin status: “Everyone took for granted that
Sue was my best friend and that I was hers. We were considered the
same person, indistinguishable, even when Sue threw pens at boys
or hopped through the halls like a kangaroo. But I was not Sue.”
As Chloe tastes the beginnings of adolescent popularity, Sue lashes
out, manipulating Chloe both physically and emotionally and eventually
breaking the nose of one of Chloe’s friends. Throughout their
high school years, both girls experience the roller-coaster highs
and lows of teenage life as they struggle with their peers, their
outrageously self-absorbed lawyer parents, and their search for
their own identities.
Since childhood, Dermansky harbored dreams of writing a novel but
buried the ambition for years. “It was a scary prospect,”
she says, “especially since I didn’t have a practical
career choice to fall back on.” She majored in English at
Haverford, and received her only 4.0 in four years when she took
creative writing her senior year. After graduation she headed to
San Francisco on a friend’s encouragement, and discovered
she was just one of many young, female aspiring writers come to
seek inspiration in the City by the Bay. “Whenever I went
to a party,” she says, “everyone else there was also
a writer. I was a walking cliché.”
She spent a few years working odd jobs before heading south to pursue
her M.A. in fiction at the University of Southern Mississippi: “I
knew at that point that I didn’t want to spend all my time
supporting myself. I just wanted to write.”
Just as Dermansky was leaving graduate school, her first short story
was published in Gulf Coast, a literary journal produced
by the University of Texas’ fiction program. In the ensuing
years, Dermansky’s stories appeared in such journals as McSweeney’s,
The Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Indiana Review.
In 1999 she won the Story magazine Carson McCullers short
story prize, and in 2002 she received the Smallmouth Press Andre
Dubus Novella Award for “Maleka, My Angel.” As her writing
received recognition and praise, the notion of writing a novel became
less of a faded dream and more of an imminently achievable goal.
Before Dermansky had thought any further beyond the
basic premise for Twins, she wrote the third scene of the
book, when Chloe and Sue set off to get matching tattoos for their
13th birthdays. “I loved it, and I knew I could develop it
into something,” she says. She herself is not a twin, and
claims that the book is in no way autobiographical, yet she tried
to put a little of herself into both of her narrators. “Which
one did I identify with more?” she asks rhetorically. “It
depended on which chapter I was writing at the time.” The
twins’ selfish parents, she says, are pure fiction—a
fact that put her own parents’ minds at ease—and other
characters combine traits from friends and enemies Dermansky has
known throughout her life.
Twins took two years to write, and another two years to
publish. Dermansky was luckier than many first novelists in stumbling
onto an agent. A young man at a new agency wrote to her expressing
admiration for a story she’d published in the Indiana
Review, and asked her if she had any plans for a full-length
novel. She didn’t at the time, but contacted him later as
she was finishing Twins. Her experience working with an
editor at William Morrow was also surprisingly positive—surprisingly,
she says, because “I’d heard that editors don’t
actually edit.”
Reviews of Twins have been overwhelmingly favorable, even
glowing. Publishers Weekly calls the book an “entertaining
debut…a moving and well-written story;” Booklist
hails it as “a beguiling story of the powerful ties between
identical twins;” and the Village Voice proclaims,
“Dermansky excels at depicting extreme emotional states and
how we rationalize them.” Dermansky was particularly excited
by Kirkus Reviews’ praise: Twins was one
of their starred reviews, unusual for a debut novelist. “Sometimes
despairing, sometimes blackly humorous, always engrossing and thoroughly
original,” Kirkus praises.
Dermansky is pondering her second novel, but says it’s too
early to hint at any plot. She continues to review world and independent
films for About.com, which she's been doing for four years with
her husband, fellow author Jurgen Fauth. The couple lives in Astoria,
New York. Her film reviews, short stories, and information about
Twins and upcoming projects can be found at her Web site,
www.marcydermansky.com.
In the meantime, one of her biggest thrills as a newly published
author comes from seeing her book displayed in local stores. “I
always want to stand around next to it, and see if any customers
recognize me from the book jacket,” she laughs.
—Brenna McBride, staff writer
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