Love Me Back

Marie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle as a young single mother behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. It's a world of long hours and late nights, and Marie often gives in to self-destructive impulses, losing herself in a tangle of bodies and urgent highs as her desire for obliteration competes with a stubborn will to survive.

Pulsing with a fierce and feral energy, Love Me Back is an unapologetic portrait of a woman cutting a precarious path through early adulthood and the herald of a powerful new voice in American fiction.

“An unapologetic portrait of a girl on her path through adolescence.”

A gorgeous, dirty razor of prose - sharp and dangerous and breathtaking.

It's an awesome book.

An unflinching and galvanic novel full of heart and heartache; one of my favourite books of the last few years.

Breathtaking, addictive, sexy, raw and honest . . . my favourite debut of the year.

You won't find so much as a sentimental comma in this staggeringly fine debut novel, and that's part of the thrill and terror of reading it.

Brilliant, devastating . . . Love Me Back is one of those exquisitely rare novels that feel desperate and urgent and absolutely necessary. - New York Times Book Review

Tierce writes with a visceral, unsentimental directness . . . Love Me Back succeeds both as a behind-the-scenes rendering of the extreme demands placed on workers in the restaurant business and a portrait of a desperate, thwarted young woman. - New Yorker

Tierce writes poignantly of the pain and loneliness, [but] Love Me Back is also filled with the kindness and humour that people offer one another when they know there's no one else. - Paris Review

Merritt Tierce, a National Book Foundation '5 Under 35' honoree, was born and raised in Texas, and graduated from college at the age of 19. She received her MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was named a Meta Rosenberg Fellow. In 2011 she was a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Merritt lives near Dallas with her husband and children.

Marie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle as a young single mother behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. It's a world of long hours and late nights, and Marie often gives in to self-destructive impulses, losing herself in a tangle of bodies and urgent highs as her desire for obliteration competes with a stubborn will to survive. Pulsing with a fierce and feral energy, Love Me Back is an unapologetic portrait of a woman cutting a precarious path through early adulthood and the herald of a powerful new voice in American fiction.

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