Marie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggles 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.

Merritt Tierce, a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, was born and raised in Texas. She received her MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was named a Meta Rosenberg Fellow, and she is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Merritt lives near Dallas with her husband and children.