Patricia Marx

Patricia Marx, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1989. She is a former writer for “Saturday Night Live” and “Rugrats” and is the author of several books, including the novels “Him Her Him Again the End of Him” and “Starting from Happy,” both of which were finalists for the Thurber Prize; numerous children’s books, among them “Now Everybody Really Hates Me,” “Meet My Staff,” and “Tired Town”; and nonfiction books, including “Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties,” “Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?: A Mother’s Suggestions,” and “You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time: Rules for Couples,” illustrated by Roz Chast.

Marx was the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon. She has taught screenwriting and humor writing at Princeton University, New York University, Columbia, and Stonybrook University, but mainly she does errands and looks things up on Wikipedia. She was the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. She can take a baked potato out of the oven with her bare hands.