Daphne Merkin is a novelist and critic who has made a name for herself with her often-unnerving candor and forthright attitude towards issues of family, religion, money, and sex as well as her ability to straddle the High/Low cultural divide. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked in book publishing for six years as first a senior editor and then associate publisher, acquiring fiction and non-fiction. In 1997, Merkin became a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she published book pieces as well as essays on personal and cultural issues, including features on Marilyn Monroe, Courtney Love, and the legacy of Sigmund Freud; she also alternated writing the movie column with Anthony Lane. One of her New Yorker essays, “Trouble in the Tribe”, was chosen for The Best American Essays of 2001, as well as The Best Spiritual Essays.
Merkin is the author of Enchantment (1986), which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for best novel on a Jewish theme and was reissued by Picador (2020), with an introduction by Vivien Gornick. She has also published two collections of essays, The Fame Lunches (2014, FSG ) , which was named a New York Times Notable book,and Dreaming of Hitler(1997, Crown), as well as a memoir about her life-long struggle with depression, This Close to Happy (2017), which received a front page review in the New York Times Book Review. Her latest book, a novel called 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love, was published in July 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Merkin continues to write cultural criticism and book pieces for a variety of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, Airmail, and The New York Review of Books. She has taught writing at the 92nd Street Y, Marymount Manhattan College, Hunter College, and at Columbia University’s MFA program. She lives in New York City.