Love Me Back stands at the crossroads of beauty and brutality. Tenderhearted readers ought to proceed with caution, though the literary critics among us will likely commit several choice sentences to memory. Merritt Tierce's prose is that sharp, and her keen eye for human frailty and resilience is that laser-focused.
Marie, the protagonist of Tierce's debut novel, waits tables at a string of restaurants, beginning at an Olive Garden and ending at a Dallas steakhouse where $100 tips are commonplace. Hers is a messy ascent, and through her series of foibles, the reader begins to see the inescapable cycle in which she's trapped. Tierce filters most of Marie's life through a few lenses: tawdry hookups in restaurant parking lots; forays with lascivious customers and their drugs; piercing moments of regret during brief visits with her daughter, who lives with Marie's ex. Tally up these traumas, self-inflicted or otherwise, and the story serves as an extended allegory for the ways in which industry servitude takes a deep psychological toll. Tierce makes Marie's life so tragic that readers might wish they could intervene, to break the cycle of choices--like self-mutilation and degrading sex--that seem as rote to Marie as polishing silverware.
It's fruitless to search for hope in Love Me Back, but readers looking for poignant, unadorned prose will find it in spades. It's not this story's brutality that lends it gravity--it's the way in which Marie is revealed to the reader, a tortured soul as real and nuanced as any living woman. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer and bookseller at Flyleaf Books