Love Me Back - Softcover

Tierce, Merritt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345807138 ISBN 13: 9780345807137

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015

Synopsis

A Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and BookRiot Best Book of the Year
A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Author

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.

About this title

Review:

"Brilliant, devastating. . . . Love Me Back is one of those exquisitely rare novels that feel desperate and urgent and absolutely necessary." --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

"A heart-cracking read." --The Chicago Tribune

"Breathtaking, addictive, sexy, raw and honest. . . . My favorite debut of the year." --Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins

"A prayer to everything broken, vulnerable, and human" --BookRiot

"So ferocious, so powerful, so fearlessly told, that by the end I felt as though the wind had been knocked out of me. Even now I have the urge to walk down the street and give a copy to everyone I pass, pressing it into their hands, telling them, "Read this. Read it now." Love Me Back is that brilliant and that necessary." --Cristina Henriquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans

"Hard to put down." --The Dallas Morning News

"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, co-creator of Portlandia

"More or less tore my scalp off" --Tom Nissley, The Millions

"Unforgettable." --Entertainment Weekly

"Absolutely enthralling from first word to last. . . . One of the most vital books about our invisible underclass I've read in years." --Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn

"One of the year's most beautiful books" --The Dallas Observer

"A staggeringly fine novel." --Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

"Exceptional. . . . Tierce's writing reflects the plot's quick, sinuous turns." --The Huffington Post

"A compulsively readable yet highly literary novel. . . . Announces Tierce as a writer we've been waiting for much too long." --Oxford American

"One of the most mesmerizing heroines in recent fiction. . . . A compulsively readable tale [that] threatens to drag Texas literature kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century." --Texas Monthly

"Will floor you. [Tierce's] sentences, poetic at times, are honest, dirty, sexy, and at times, tragic. . . . A completely unique reading experience." --Bustle


"(A) sexy, honest debut." --Marie Claire


"Tierce writes with a visceral, unsentimental directness." --The New Yorker


"Tierce's prose is a shock to the system. . . . It also feels original, a voice from below that we haven't heard before, that hasn't had the temerity to speak up until now." --Texas Observer

"Sad and dirty and beautifully written novel. . . . Merritt Tierce is a hell of a writer. Believe me, after reading this book, you will never look at your waitress in quite the same way again." --Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time

Book Description:

'Brilliant, devastating... one of those exquisitely rare novels that feel desperate and urgent and absolutely necessary' (New York Times) Love Me Back details the devastating self-destructive downward spiral of a young waitress trapped in the service industry. An uncomfortable, unflinching, unmissable US debut.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0345807138
• ISBN 13: 9780345807137
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224