Love Me Back

June 16, 2014
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.

August 1, 2014
An emotionally barren waitress hustles her way through life, dulled by sex, drugs and self-inflicted burns. This brutal, darkly poetic debut novel earned Tierce, a recent Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate, a Rona Jaffe award and inclusion in the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35." It's a flawed thing of beauty, as terribly uncomfortable to read as it is often brilliant. The tale jumps around in time and tone, feeling much like a series of short stories that have been stitched together to form a whole. When we first meet Marie in "Put Your Back Into It," she describes four doctors she met at a catering event, three of whom she sleeps with. From there, we get her story in fits and starts: She gets married far too young to the teenage boy who fathers the little girl she's not ready to take care of. The guy splits when she gives him an STD she caught sleeping around. To survive, she becomes a professional waitress, sleekly navigating the nuances of the restaurant floor while simultaneously taking bumps of coke and suffering the cock-and-bull machismo of the kitchen. As we follow her from Chili's and The Olive Garden through classier cafes and finally to "The Restaurant," a high-end Dallas steakhouse, we get stories of corrupt managers, kitchen hustlers, back-stabbing waiters and dim bussers, all sharply portrayed. If there's a significant hurdle to believability, it's Marie's reckless, self-destructive sex life. We already know she's a cutter, but the number of people she submits to is shocking, often letting men double-team her in walk-ins, pickup trucks and back rooms. "It pays to hustle, it pays to bend over," she advises. "You keep your standards high and your work strong but these are necessary for success; you keep your dignity separate, somewhere else, attached to different things." The cold and honest confessions of a damaged young woman who lives to serve.

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August 1, 2014
In a very matter-of-fact telling of a story that is anything but, a twentysomething gal with self-destructive tendencies narrates her life as if she were looking at it from the outside, providing unflinching portrayals of sex, drugs, and depression. In nonlinear snippets, readers learn about her daughter and failed marriage, her one-night stands, her self-cutting, drinking, and general detached malaise. The one thing that brings her life focus is her job as a waitress. While everything else appears to be teetering on the edge of no return, she hones her craft as a server and takes pride in her work ethic, the source of a glimmer of hope for a more positive sense of self. Rona Jaffe Award winner Tierce's use of an intimate first-person voice renders the alienation her narrator feels in stark relief, evincing a sensibility much like singer-songwriter Liz Phair's unique brand of sexual authority and sadness. There's an honesty here. Tierce's first novel is unsentimental and unresolved but ultimately laced with an undercurrent of hope.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2014

In this shocking debut novel by Tierce, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award recipient and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Maria is a smart but self-destructive young woman working as a waitress at a high-end Dallas steakhouse who attempts to lose herself in the sex- and drug-filled world of the service industry. She has encounters with many men--customers, coworkers, and occasionally her husband--while endlessly degrading herself. Tierce jumps fearlessly into the surreal world that is Maria's life, taking the reader along on a terrifying ride. Unfortunately, though Tierce is a gifted writer who has made Maria's emotional damage obvious, it's difficult to feel sympathy for Maria or the other equally unlikable characters and nearly impossible to care about what finally happens to her. Though the novel is full of astute observations of the human psyche, the lack of emotional connection between the reader and the main character (something Judith Rossner managed to achieve in Looking for Mr. Goodbar) makes the explicit sex scenes feel gratuitous and obscene. VERDICT An unsympathetic and disturbing look at a lost woman's search for connection--via sex and drugs--among a group of dysfunctional restaurant workers. [See Prepub Alert, 3/24/14; see also "Summer Best Debuts," First Novels, LJ 7/14.]--Lisa Block, Atlanta

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