Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

Published by Doubleday on September 16, 2014

Love Me Back, title notwithstanding, is not a trashy romance novel. It is quite the opposite. The narrator is Marie Young. When the novel begins, Marie is a 22-year-old waitress who has frequent unsatisfying sex with the doctors who visit her upscale steakhouse ... and with the owners, managers, cooks, busboys, and other servers who work with her. She has "that broken sooty piece of something lodged inside you making you veer left" instead of continuing on a straight and narrow path. She has always known that a "normal" life of wife and mother could never be her reality.

Marie is clearly smarter than the life she is living, although it is late in the novel before we learn just how smart she is and how much potential she has wasted. She takes us through her history -- a teenage pregnancy followed by marriage, uncertain parenting skills, lousy temp and waitressing jobs, serial infidelity, drug abuse -- before the story returns to the present. Now she's scarred and living in Dallas, working at the most lucrative waitressing job she's ever had. She has changed her location but little has changed about her life. She loves her five-year-old daughter but rarely sees her. The men she stays with tend to be hateful but they don't stay long since she always cheats on them.

Merritt Tierce's prose is fiercely eloquent, well suited to a story that is raw in its honesty. Readers who dislike explicit language or promiscuous characters would probably want to avoid this book. None of the language is gratuitous, however; its use is consistent with the characters who use it. Nor are the sex scenes unnecessary, given the nature of Marie's life. Certainly they are not meant to titillate.

For all its familiarity, Love Me Back is a compelling account of a young woman's pain. As Marie struggles to understand her behavior, the reader gains insight into how she (and others in her position) uses sex as a shield against grief and loss, or degradation as the punishment they feel they deserve. The question is whether it is possible to kill the pain without killing yourself. Tierce gives the reader no answer to that question, which is the novel's only flaw. The story has an unfinished feel because Marie's life is unfinished, but it is disappointing that this snapshot of her life offers few clues as to where her life will take her.

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