Skip to content
Patricia Marx
Patricia Marx, credit Catherine Chalmers

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” and “Meet My Staff”; and nonfiction books, including “Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties” and, most recently, “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.

Books

About Tired Town

Goodnight Moon meets Goodnight Already! in this very funny bedtime book from New Yorker contributors Patricia Marx and Roz Chast.

This is the story of Nellie Bee Nightly, who is not tired at all. And swears she never will be!

The popcorn is too pooped to pop, and the nightstand is too tired to stand up straight and must lie down ― but Nellie? Nope, she's wide awake, and not ready for bedtime AT ALL. Instead, she gives her goldfish a mustache and hangs her bed from the ceiling so that she can install a swimming pool in her room. Nellie, after all, went to sleep last night, and shouldn’t that be enough sleep to last a lifetime?

Wonderfully quirky, subversively sweet, and effortlessly classic, Tired Town is a brilliant new bedtime story from humorist Patricia Marx and Roz Chast, the #1 New York Times-bestselling and award-winning creator of Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir and I Must Be Dreaming.