Stephen Marche

Stephen Marche (/mɑːrʃ/ MARSH; born 1976)^[1] is a Canadian novelist, essayist, and cultural commentator. He is an alumnus of the University of King's College^[2] and City College of New York (CUNY).^[3] In 2005, he received a doctorate in early modern English drama from the University of Toronto.^[4] He taught Renaissance drama at CUNY until 2007, when he resigned in order to write full-time.^[5]

Stephen Marche
Born	1976 (age 48–49) Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Occupation	Journalist
Website	stephenmarche.com

Career as writer

Marche is a contributing editor at Esquire, for which he writes a monthly column entitled "A Thousand Words about Our Culture". In 2011, this column was a finalist for the American Society of Magazine Editors award for columns and commentary.^[6] Marche's articles also appear in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic,^[7] The Walrus, The Guardian,^[8] and other publications. Marche is also a weekly contributor to CBC Radio.

Marche's novel Raymond and Hannah was published in 2005. An anthology of short stories linked by a common plot element, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, followed in 2007.^[9] How Shakespeare Changed Everything was published in 2011.^[10][11] Another novel, The Hunger Of The Wolf, was published in February 2015.^[12] Marche's take on the state of male–female relations in the 21st century, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century, was published in March 2017 with contributions from his wife.^[13]

Marche wrote an opinion piece published by The New York Times on August 14, 2015, titled "The Closing of the Canadian Mind."^[14] In this article he was critical of Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, linking him with Rob Ford, former Mayor of Toronto who was involved in a crack cocaine scandal. Marche also published an opinion piece in The New York Times on November 25, 2017, titled "The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido,"^[15] about the challenges and necessity of male engagement with feminism.

Marche wrote an essay published by The New York Times Book Review on February 26, 2023, titled "A Writer's Lament: The Better You Write, the More You Will Fail".^[16] The essay discussed writing and failure and noted that "failure" is normal for writers much of the time, and that near-obsessive persevering in the face of failure to be published is the mark of a true writer. In particular, he noted that a writer may have commercial success at times, but still, their best work may be the biggest failure (perhaps only recognized after a writer has died—using Melville's Billy Budd as an example). In the last paragraph of the essay, Marche wrote: "Good writers offer advice. Great writers offer condolences."

Personal life

Marche is married to Sarah Fulford,^[1] the former editor-in-chief of Toronto Life magazine.^[17] Fulford is a daughter of Canadian journalist Robert Fulford. Marche and Fulford have a daughter and a son,^[18] and live in Toronto.

Bibliography

Novels

• Raymond and Hannah (2005)
• Love and the Mess We're in (2012)
• The Hunger of the Wolf (2015)
• The Last Election (co-authored with Andrew Yang, 2023)
• Death of an Author (2023)

Short fiction

• Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (2007)

Non-fiction

• How Shakespeare Changed Everything (2011)
• The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century (2017)
• The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (2022)
• On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer (Field Notes, 2023)

Essays and reporting

• "In praise of the new narcissism", Esquire, January 2013.
• "The Closing of the Canadian Mind", The New York Times, 14 August 2015.
• "The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido", The New York Times, 25 November 2017.
• "Al Qaeda Won", Foreign Policy, 10 September 2018.
• "The 'debate of the century': what happened when Jordan Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek", The Guardian, 20 April 2019.
• "The America I loved is gone", The Guardian, 20 April 2025.
• "Canadians Are Seriously Worried About War With the U.S." The Atlantic, 4 May 2025.