The Bountiful Badness of Marie
Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky is clever and funny, a riotous ride through the mind of a deranged but strangely appealing anti-heroine, and a jumbled journey from New York to Paris and beyond. I’m not going to give away anything more of the completely original and wacky plot but suffice it to say that Marie is indeed very, very bad.
Despite her badness (she does something no mother could ever forgive), I found myself rooting for Marie. She is perennially unlucky, seemingly fated to make the wrong choices, and she has been insufficiently loved, doomed by mother and boyfriends to be left behind. She has no safety net of family or money, talent or ambition (I can see, after reading Bad Marie, how ambition can serve as a form of safety blanket — without it, a person can be utterly lost, disowned, and without compass of any sort). But who can blame Marie for failing to find motivation in a world marching to a drummer she cannot even hear?
Marie finds direction, then love, and then a measure of responsibility, in the toddler she cares for. Caitlin is the daughter of Marie’s high school friend, a woman as opposite to Marie as possible. It is Caitlin and Marie’s shared love of baths that sets the plot of Bad Marie in motion, and it is their mutual and unquestioning need of each other that forms the heart of this book. Because of how Marie loves Caitlin — she loves her as every child deserves to be loved — all the other expectations I might have had of Marie fell away. Everything else Marie does, bad or stupid or dangerous, is in the end far less important than how she loves her little charge, and how she cares for her.
Marie never considers the consequences of anything she does — which is her downfall, again and again — and yet by the end of the novel, she understands the gig is up, that her wild search for a place to belong and a person to belong to is over. But does she despair? No, she focuses in on the moment — a toddler’s characteristic and one worth holding onto throughout life — and takes a bath with the one person she loves, and who loves her back. Maybe Marie is not so bad, after all.
