Love Me Back
A Novel
-
-
4.7 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Sharp and dangerous and breathtaking.... A defiant story about a young woman choosing the life and motherhood that is best for her, without apology.” —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tierce's debut allow readers to glimpse into the mind of a young Texas woman intent on harming herself. Her poor decision-making is a self-imposed penitence for abandoning her daughter. Marie, the novel's narrator, gets pregnant at 16. She tries to do what she believes is right and marry the father, but they just can't make it work. Five-plus years as a hard-living waitress follows. Marie flees her family for the Dallas restaurant scene, gets drawn in by the wrong men repeatedly, self-mutilates, and sleeps with whomever will have her. 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.
