Merritt Tierce was born and raised in Texas and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Author. Her first book, the novel Love Me Back (Doubleday), was shortlisted for the PEN/Bingham prize for debut fiction and won the Texas Institute of Letters’ Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction. Merritt wrote for the last two seasons of the Netflix show Orange is the New Black, and for the pandemic anthology Social Distance. Her December 2021 cover story for The New York Times Magazine, “The Abortion I Didn’t Have,” went viral, and she is currently developing various film and television projects about abortion, in addition to writing a second novel.
-
Love Me BackA Novel
I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my
smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut
might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad
muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took
me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the
willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of
course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.
Love Me Back:A Novel -
Love Me BackA Novel
We can’t have pets in my apartment so we put together a jigsaw puzzle of a Saint Bernard on the floor in the hall. You name him Barry, after the legendary Alpine rescue dog. You buy a bag of dog food with your own money and leave bowls of food and water next to him. I hear you apologize to him once when you accidentally step on his tail.
You tell me you have decided you are not going to have children when you grow up. You are going to live in an RV, which you call a house car. You will have two dogs and it will just be the three of you, traveling everywhere with the windows down. You tell me Barry will be too old to go with you. You whisper so his feelings aren’t hurt. You ask me if I will take care of him when you leave home and I say I will.
Love Me Back:A Novel -
Love Me BackA Novel
The fifth or sixth sous-chef I worked with was griping at Florida John one night over some mess that had gone down earlier in the evening, when I walked up to restock some plates. Why can’t you be like this one? said the sous-chef, putting his hand on my shoulder. Don’t matter what happens out there, she’s ice. What’s your secret? he asked. Enlighten this motherfucker.
Accept that shit is all fucked up and roll with it, I said. Don’t bitch. Just adapt. Nothing is going to go right and everything is going to be hard.
Jesus, Confucius, said the sous-chef.
Love Me Back:A Novel
“To transgress, to ‘go beyond a boundary or limit,’ can also echo transcendence, as Tierce demonstrates in her brilliant, devastating debut novel . . . Love Me Back is one of those exquisitely rare novels that feel desperate and urgent and absolutely necessary.” —Paula Bomer, The New York Times Book Review
“A gorgeous, dirty razor of prose — sharp and dangerous and breathtaking. This is a defiant story about a young woman choosing the life and motherhood that is best for her, without apology.” —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist [on Love Me Back]
“Tierce’s prose possesses the force, bluntness and surprise of a sucker punch . . . One of my favorite books of the last few years.” —Carrie Brownstein, author of Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl [on Love Me Back]
Merritt Tierce’s novel Love Me Back is marked by extraordinary daring and restraint, boldly refusing epiphany at the end. Hers is a sui generis presence in fiction, one that approaches economically marginalized lives with an unflinching and off-kilter gaze. There is a coldness to the writing that exhilarates; Tierce’s work chafes against the notion that female protagonists need be relatable. This is clear-eyed, dark-hearted, and mordantly funny writing about getting stuck inside your own mistakes. Once read it can’t be forgotten.