{"id":140,"date":"2018-12-31T10:54:15","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T10:54:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=140"},"modified":"2018-12-31T10:54:15","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T10:54:15","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=140","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, <\/span>and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
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Born and raised in Texas, Merritt Tierce<\/span> worked in various secretarial, retail, and restaurant\u00a0 positions until 2009, when she moved to Iowa City to attend the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop as the Meta Rosenberg Fellow.<\/p>\n

After graduating in 2011 with her MFA from Iowa, she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and she is a 2013 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Author.<\/p>\n

She\u00a0 served as the executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, a Dallas-based nonprofit abortion fund, from 2011 until 2014. She volunteered and worked for the TEA Fund from its founding in 2004, and co-wrote the abortion play One in 3<\/span> with Gretchen Dyer and Victoria Loe Hicks. One in 3<\/span> played to sold-out houses for most of its three-week run and stimulated a local conversation about the reality of abortion in women\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n

Merritt\u2019s first published story, “Suck It,” was selected by ZZ Packer to be anthologized in the 2008 edition of New Stories from the South, and her first book, Love Me Back, was published by Doubleday in 2014, to wide acclaim. Merritt lives near Dallas with her husband and children.<\/p>\n

Author photo by Michael Lionstar<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/a><\/span><\/a><\/span>Fiction<\/p>\n

Merritt Tierce<\/span><\/p>\n

Love Me Back: A Novel<\/span><\/p>\n

New York: Doubleday<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-0-385538077<\/p>\n

224 pages, $23.95<\/p>\n

September 16, 2014<\/p>\n

New York: Anchor Paperback 978-0-345807137<\/p>\n

224 pages, $15.95<\/p>\n

June 9, 2015<\/p>\n

Love Me Bac<\/span> is \u201c5 Under 35\u201d honoree<\/span> and Rona Jaffe award winner Merritt Tierce\u2019s<\/span> debut novel. Marie is a young twentysomething woman who lands a coveted waitressing job at an upscale Uptown Dallas restaurant. Serving herself up night after night, Marie is mired in a miasma of hedonistic nihilism, the drugs and alcohol and musical beds her clawing for oblivion. \u201cBut it wasn\u2019t about pleasure; it was about how some kinds of pain make fine antidotes to others.\u201d<\/p>\n

Containing no such thing as plot or pacing, the narrative jumping back and forth through time, Love Me Back<\/span> reads more like a series of linked short stories. Tierce\u2019s writing reminds me of Mary Gaitskill. Her language in Marie\u2019s first-person account is stark, potent, sparing nothing, with intermittent injections of sardonic humor. \u201cAt the club he schmoozed Dallas\u2019s most expensive, meticulously produced women\u201d\u2014 we\u2019re all familiar with these women, yes?<\/p>\n

Her descriptions of the other personalities at the restaurant are sharply observed. \u201cEgregious enthusiasm is Danny\u2019s trademark\u2014 he can transmit his buzz and momentum to anyone at will. This is called charisma. His charisma\u2014 any charisma, I suppose\u2014is entirely performance, yet in being never more nor less than a performer he somehow remains endearingly genuine.\u201d We\u2019ve all had our senses assaulted by this guy, yes?<\/p>\n

Marie is not immoral, not a bad person\u2014rather she seems to be lost in an amoral spiral. She\u2019s a loyal friend, a hard worker, compassionate with those worse off than she is, and a loving, attentive mother when with her daughter. Marie has no agency; she merely reacts. She doesn\u2019t think she deserves agency, convinced that whatever happens to her is what she deserves. \u201cWhatever is in me that makes decisions is now full of an accretion of plaque, the chalky consequence of, paradoxically, so many hollow moments.\u201d However, there is no self-pity here, no shirking of responsibility, no denial. This is a clear-eyed study of a train wreck on two legs. By the end of the book, there is reason for hope for Marie and she\u2019s obtained some hard-earned wisdom. \u201cIn that restaurant all of us were off. Chipped. Everybody on the way to the curve. Maybe it\u2019s the same in a law firm, a nail salon, whatever high or low. Maybe that\u2019s just what it is to be alive, you\u2019ve got that broken sooty piece of something lodged inside you making you veer left.\u201d<\/p>\n

Love Me Back<\/span> was hailed upon release as a new sort of Texas literature, and many speculated that the predominance of cowboys and the rural had finally been left behind. Well, this is different from what Texas writers have historically produced and I welcome the expansion of topic. Love Me Back<\/span> is aggressive and urban and casts an unflinching light upon a certain set of vapid emperors who have no clothes.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}