To transgress, to 'go beyond a boundary or limit,' can also echo transcendence, as Tierce demonstrates in her brilliant, devastating debut novel ... Refreshingly, Tierce pays scrupulous attention to the details of restaurant work, and she is no less attuned to the squalor of Marie’s sexual encounters. Granted, there are moments of joy and pleasure, but they are fleeting.The problem with summarizing the plot is that it somewhat obfuscates what this book is really about: that misogyny is alive and well, and all too many men still enjoy degrading women ... Love Me Back is one of those exquisitely rare novels that feel desperate and urgent and absolutely necessary.
Merritt Tierce’s debut novel is a stylishly brutal account of the life of a waitress working in a series of Texas restaurants ... The prose is laconic, vernacular; at first, the book seems like a well-executed but predictable entry in the genre of trauma lit. As it develops, however, it moves in a far more interesting direction ... Sex scenes and restaurant scenes bleed into each other; they have the same dissociated feeling and adrenaline rush ... Throughout, the story is elevated by Tierce’s fierce and elegant writing. The pace is that of a cocaine binge, and the voice moves from big-hearted to heartless to maudlin with the frank dispatch of a waitress dealing with a demanding dinner crowd. It is also quietly funny ... There are points at which the plot wanders ... Sometimes Marie’s voice feels a little glib; cool for cool’s sake. But these brief lapses scarcely matter: the scenes are too powerful, too real. We are unequivocally along for the ride. It is also heartening to read an American novel that takes working-class life seriously. Here, the world of waiting tables is an arena large enough for tragedy and glory, and Tierce is not documenting the lives of its people from the viewpoint of an anthropologist, but singing them as their Homer ... Nor does the heroic tone feel like hyperbole. It is the size of life seen from the inside – because we are never in any doubt that these are Tierce’s people. She is not just telling stories about them, she is bearing witness on their behalf, and she does so with a wholly writerly – that is, ruthless – love.
When I started reading Merritt Tierce’s debut novel about a self-destructive waitress, by page four I thought Tierce had penned the greatest restaurant book on earth. By page six...I had the shivers ... From the get-go, it’s clear that this is an author who understands the perverse power that comes from allowing our female bodies to be used. Which is to say: this is a book that talks about how powerful and fragile and dangerous it is to be a woman living, working, and reproducing in the world we know today ... In a book so visceral and vitriolic that Tierce’s insights come at you like thrown acid, it’s hard to pin down the one thing that should make you read it. But for the mothers out there, Tierce has captured the frantic desire to both protect and expel these creatures that come out screaming, red-faced from us, expecting the whole world ... Not since Isabelle Hupert in The Piano Teacher have we encountered a woman so incapable of bearing the weight of being loved. If we can wish one thing for Marie and her creator, Merritt Tierce, it’s that this book will put the term 'unlikeable character' to rest. I didn’t like this bone-worked, maddening, cavernous mother, I loved her all the way to her rotted core, and rooted for her — still root for — this modern woman doing the worst version of her best.
In her extraordinary debut novel Love Me Back ... Tierce nails how the woundedness of people who work in restaurants is connected to the degradation of their jobs ... Tierce’s stark and fierce prose shines in...intimacy-loaded behind-the-scenes moments when servers have near-telepathic communication in the intricate orchestration of table service ... Sexuality is a complicated terrain, and Tierce mines it unabashedly ... Tierce bravely subverts the male gaze into a female one, in that Marie is the one objectifying men, finding what is pleasing to her. Her behavior is definitely driven by her desire, her vision, her attraction — which is one thing that makes this book so unusual. Yet even though she’s making the choices, her sexual journey is still steeped in degradation and humiliation ... There’s a detachment to Tierce’s writing: her prose has a post-traumatic-stress-like disconnection but also a visceral immediacy and intimacy...that practically forces the reader to participate in Marie’s experiences. This can be brutal ... Tierce is perhaps most brilliant in showing how the prostitute-like, soul-sucking qualities of work in the service industry are conducive to Marie’s self-destruction, and vice versa ... Again and again, Marie’s actions — sexual and otherwise — aim toward self-obliteration without break or awareness or hope. Yet she breathes on the page, undeniably sexual, fucked up, complicated, and alive: she dares us to acknowledge her.
I was glad to have read Love Me Back — twice! — for this review, and reading it changed me. But it was also so painful, I know I could never read it again.
This spirited, compelling and often accomplished novel – the debut work of the Texas-born writer Merritt Tierce – is concerned with the shape a life can take when it is visited by unplanned occurrences ... The structure of Marie's story, which Tierce tells in often arresting prose, is episodic and fragmentary. For the most part, this works well as a means of evoking the sense of alienation she feels from her atomised life. But Tierce's uneven handling of the form can rob her tale of momentum and contributes to a sense of incompleteness that afflicts the novel as a whole ... What really holds Love Me Back together is the strange magnetism of Marie's voice. Like the story it chronicles, it is direct and reflective, impassioned and affectless, brutal and tender – and full of affirmative force.
... [Tierce] adroitly captures both the intense vitality of the milieu and its funny, nasty, often misogynistic vernacular ... more than a brilliant workplace novel, however. It's true that the waiter's requisite combination of showmanship and hustle makes for memorable characters ... But Tierce also has an impeccable ear, and writes sentences that snap out at you as unexpectedly as a rolled-up towel ... a heart-cracking read ... the prose continually invites the reader to share that double frisson of voyeurism and exhibitionism ... Despite this unrelenting bleakness, however, the novel throbs with a sense of Marie's agency, her determination to drown her sense of self matched only by her will to survive the drowning. But survival never looks as much like redemption as we'd like to think. That Marie's grim tumble down the rabbit hole remains gripping, even over the course of such a relatively short novel, is a testament to Tierce's powers as a writer.
Texan Merritt Tierce’s powerful debut novel gives an uncomfortable and unsentimental portrayal of the American restaurant scene ... Sexually explicit and unashamedly fierce, Love Me Back is at once an exposé of bad practices in the service industry and a searing portrait of a smart young woman in freefall. It is a gut-wrenching story of pain and the lengths people will go to block out guilt and shame. Mordant and pensive, weary and innocent, wildly irresponsible and a diligent worker, Marie is a mess of contradictions, a human being bent on destruction but desperate to survive ... The short story structure of the book brings suspense and makes the reader work, as each chapter delves into a new predicament, most of them unpleasant. These situations are continually undercut with a grim humour and a sharp eye for social insight ... Shooting straight from the hip, Love Me Back is the story of a woman who hits bottom while working her way to the top.
...a devastating book regarding pain and loss and satiety and desperately trying to be away from your own head. The central way the book presents and works through these things is through waitressing. Marie, our lead, is a raw daggery incessancy, her rhythm a clipped, curt beauty of sentences ... As easy as it is to freak for subject-matter or thematic stuff in Love Me Back, know that the thing’s all lighterfluid language, shocking for the rapidity with which it goes up ... it’s the best book I know of to cast real light on the sinister enginery of restaurant workers ... there’s an endlessness to everyone and everything in Love Me Back, an endlessness of want and speed and work and money and hunger and drugs ... It’s worth noting that one of the things that makes Love Me Back such a devastatingly good read is how ‘unapologetic’ and ‘unflinching’ and ‘raw’ this book is ... While those qualifiers are true, and are breathtaking, it doesn’t feel fair to merely name them, to point lights square at what feels like the monumental daring Tierce must have to pull such work off ... what Tierce—what Marie—is rawly offering is a monumentally conflicted...take on the ways in which our hungers ride us like unbroken horses ... when the book end...you may, as I did, feel so acutely seen you’ll slam the book shut, hard, saying damn it the way you do when you know someone’s got your number.
There is so much sex in this book. Couple sex, office sex, awkward sex, car park sex, bored sex, abusive sex, acrobatic upside-down sex. But this is not a steamy bonkbuster of a novel that you’ll want to take on holiday. Love Me Back is a dark, depressing work about a woman who reinforces all of the worst thoughts about herself by surrounding herself with bad men who are more than willing to use her ... Love Me Back was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W Bingham prize for debut fiction and Tierce was named a '5 under 35' honoree by the National Book Foundation. As an addition to the conversation on teen pregnancy, you can see why it is important and timely. But my god, it’s bleak ... If this sort of desperate, dark soul-searching moves you, you’ll gain much from this book.
Can you wholeheartedly enjoy something, but find it deeply uncomfortable? Love Me Back, the debut novel by Texas-born Merritt Tierce, is proof that you can ... as [Marie] crashes and battles through life, Tierce’s pacey prose pulls you along with her. There’s no pausing for apologies, or sentimental explanations, and no hero comes along and makes everything better. It’s an odd contradiction, as a reader, to wish a story was different — for Marie’s life to be different — while at the same time lapping up its brilliance.
...brutal, darkly poetic ... It’s a flawed thing of beauty, as terribly uncomfortable to read as it is often brilliant. The tale jumps around in time and tone, feeling much like a series of short stories that have been stitched together to form a whole ... The cold and honest confessions of a damaged young woman who lives to serve.
With the drug-fueled restaurant world as a backdrop, Tierce’s pages catalogue the joyless and degrading sex to which Aimee submits. The novel feels flat at times, and the number of Aimee’s partners rises steadily without much change to her situation. But the depths of her self-loathing, related bluntly and almost offhandedly, give the book a weight and a resonance that defies its matter-of-fact voice.
