The word "unflinching" appears frequently in reviews of author Merrit Tierce's debut novel, Love Me Back; so do words like "searing," "raw," and "unrelenting." The book follows its protagonist Marie through one bad decision after another, leaving the reader to wonder why? Of course, the book isn't just about "why" but about "who"--who is Marie, and why are we more curious about the answer to that question than she is?
Tierce created Marie in her own image, drawing on her own tumultuous years working in the restaurant industry. If you've ever worked in foodservice, the (mostly) afterhours sex- and drug-fests in which Marie seeks refuge may not be as shocking as they are familiar.
That's not to say that every waiter, waitress, and bartender is an aimless shell seeking external validation through negative attention, but anyone who has worked in the service industry will recognize Marie. She is ambivalent about herself outside of her role as waitress; Marie's limited self-confidence comes exclusively from her ability to wait more tables and make more tips than other servers. "I think Marie was damaged when she fell into [waitressing], and it gave her a great stovetop on which to cook up all her pain," explained Tierce by phone in New York City, where she is kicking off her book tour. Restaurant life is rife with opportunities for anyone with a lot of pain to make big mistakes, said Tierce. "Who knows what would have happened if Marie stayed at Sally Beauty Company? The fast, dark, druggy after-hours restaurant culture provides a way for her to find her way down to the bad stuff, really quickly. In life, one needs to do that before one can build out from there."
Love Me Back doesn't always read like a novel, but as she never sat down to specifically write a novel, that's quite all right with Tierce. She wrote a short story called 'Suck It' which appears as a chapter in Love Me Back, and then others followed, with recurring characters making appearances and creating a thread of continuity. "I still feel like it's strange that I've written a novel," laughed Tierce. "When the book was sold, I hadn't written the interstitial chapters where Marie addresses her daughter. They provide the connective tissue and they are my favorite parts of the book right now." While Tierce is not necessarily interested in redemption or closure for Marie ("It's not true to life--I would feel like a sham inventing some sort of redemption."), the addition of these passages allows the reader to experience empathy for a character whose poor decisions make her difficult to like.
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