Love Me Back is compelling, worth reading, and strange: it is a novel almost without psychology, in which the protagonist, Marie, acts without asking herself why she acts (“Whatever is in me that makes decisions is now full of an accretion of plaque”). It is a strange book too to read back-to-back with Peter Thiel and Blake Masters’s Zero to One: that book is about startups, innovation, change, and societies, while Love Me Back is about Sisyphean repetition, ancient industries, grunt labor, and sex. The two books o occupy different market worlds, and Thiel and Masters mention restaurants repeatedly as the sort of low-margin high-competition businesses one doesn’t want to be in. Marie is in the business from necessity and because it provides opportunities she wouldn’t have otherwise: opportunities for sex and drugs, and opportunities to turn her mind off and make the money she can’t or couldn’t make otherwise.

The novel’s chronology is chopped in an appealing way: Marie starts the story as an experienced worker and then jumps back and forward. It’s disorienting in a way that perhaps mirrors the disorientation of service at a restaurant. She is observational, though, from the start, imagining a customer thinking, “Would I be like Jordan?”, since Jordan “was a young blond waitress liberated by one of her customers.” The word “liberated” is key and yet Marie doesn’t seem to want to be liberated: she wants not slavery but structure. The novel is partially addressed to her daughter, who Marie bears as a teenager and whose father is unnamed, and in one early encounter with a man who “reminded me of a hairless mole we’d seen at the zoo” she snorts coke and then says:

I imagined her sitting on the counter, her short legs hanging off, swinging. I went back into the bedroom and said, I’m sorry, I have to go, I’m not well. I was shaking and I felt beautiful. I thought how beautiful it was that I had only one garment to put back on, my black cocktail dress there on the floor. I pulled it over my head. I don’t wear underwear. See you, I said. He didn’t try to stop me.

There is no antecedent to the pronoun “her:” we infer that Marie is speaking of her daughter. For a moment Marie feels something; it isn’t obvious that she often feels beautiful despite the action she gets. She senses without articulating it the power of glamour (one of her first restaurant men wears aviators, an object Postrel specifically discusses at the link). Marie is ambiguous in general; at moment she says “I hated staying the night because it was always different in the morning.” Was it? Is it? Why? The party ends, yes, and perhaps the illusion can’t be sustained and Marie wants the illusion. But relationships of any duration are the breaking of the illusion and the creation of something else in its place.

It is impossible to intelligently discuss Love Me Back without mentioning sex and the restaurant business. When Marie begins she says:

That was the best body I ever had, and the worst mind. I was seventeen. I was slender and strong and I also had swollen C-cup breasts. [. . . ] my mind was an open sore. It was black. I couldn’t tell if I was deep inside it or totally outside it. I would imagine being fatally cleaved all day long.

She never stops imagining being “fatally cleaved,” or so it would appear. The next three paragraphs spoils the novel to a minor extent, but the novel ends with Marie’s description of her getting ready for work, in a “professional” manner (with “professional” repeated often enough to make us skeptical of the term) and she says:

He starches everything to spec, so my long bistro apron can stand on its own and the creases in my sleeves will be so pointy that even at ten thirty tonight when I walk up to my last table for the first time they will see those creases and they’ll trust me just a little. My name is Marie, and I’ll take care of you tonight.

She’s where she started. Nothing changes in the restaurant business, or change happens so slowly that it isn’t perceived by the workers in the business. The work is cyclical, mythic, like economics prior to the Industrial Revolution. Hence the jarring feeling of reading Thiel and Masters next to Tierce. Love Me Back is about elemental matters, sexual and economic, and their book is about change. Both are beautifully written but in very, very different ways; Love Me Back took longer to enter but its proffered rewards turned out to be real.

The restaurant business is ugly and fascinating and un-PC. One man, Christopher, dispenses this advice, before he fucks teenaged Marie: “There’s only two times in a restaurant: before and after. You walk in, you white-knuckle it, try not to fuck up till it’s over and then it’s over. You made your money or you didn’t.” The third time in a restaurant business might be when you write about it. Marie likes it because exhaustion keeps her from thinking: she is “always that heavy, iron kind of tired” and her “exhaustion was metallic.” She likes it. She doesn’t have to think and doesn’t want to, which is curious given another seemingly throwaway detail: Marie has been admitted to Yale but shows few real interests or abstract thoughts. What is she interested in? Art? Science? Startups? Philosophy? We don’t see much. Certainly plenty of otherwise vapid students with good grades and test scores get into high-status, highly marketed schools, but Marie seems an extreme example.

She does learn outside of work:

I learned a lot of things while I worked [at Chili’s]. I learned how to sweep aggressively and efficiently. I learned how to anticipate and consolidate, which is all waiting tables is. I learned how to use work to forget. I learned how to have an orgasm and I learned I was a bad wife.

Many of those things are not like other things; they are so disparate that one learns both much and little about Marie at once. Marie learns that “there were rules to being a waitress. The main one was don’t fuck up.” Arguably that’s a rule of relationships too; the lack of punctuation, italics, or some other separation between the word “was” and “don’t fuck up” is also characteristics of the novel’s overall tone, which is chatty but not shallow. It seems like one should tire of it by the end, but I didn’t.

Marie rejects the support system she has: she leaves her parents because they treat her daughter more like their daughter, and while when she first leaves “They didn’t live far from us” she “didn’t know what to report. I hate that I hate my life?” The language here is clever: a weaker writer would’ve simply said “I hate my life,” but hating that she hates her life makes sense, and makes me pause: she chose her life and as such it doesn’t make sense to hate it. She’s too smart for simple teenage hate, but the perpetual restaurant life and the perpetual need for cash don’t sound fun either. Reading between the lines might also make Love Me Back a very subtle argument for making IUDs widely available, since they are tremendously effective and safe. But that would require acknowledging what people and especially teenagers want, and we live in a culture where that doesn’t happen; Marie doesn’t quite want to acknowledge what she wants, either. Want is somewhere in the rush to perpetual action, whether at the job or through sex. Let’s not ask why.

I hesitate to include the above paragraph because it makes the novel sound like a policy brief, which it isn’t. But it will in some quarters be read as one. Marie’s poverty is too persistent; for one holiday she says that “Thanksgiving dinner was the rice and beans with the onion and Ro*Tel added for flavor, which is what we usually ate, and the pie. He said the pie was the best thing he had ever eaten in his life.” But that’s also the night her husband learns that “it hurts when I piss,” and Marie knows why: “I knew that I had given Danny chlamydia and I knew I’d slept with my husband since then.” That undercuts whatever domestic success Thanksgiving might otherwise have entailed. One of the guys she chooses to fuck is described this way:

On his chest the tattooed face of a pit bull he said was the best friend he’d ever had, on his left calf a beckoning, bare-titted mermaid. Over his entire back a flaming skull, the fire burning up toward the nape of his neck [. . .] On his wedding finger a black band where a ring would go.

He is signaling his beliefs and attitudes effectively. During a three-way with two men, neither of whom is her husband, Marie says that one “Held me in place like that and I kept myself taut against him almost as if I were trying to resist or get away but it was the best thing I had ever felt with a man.” The divorce is almost foreordained. The other guys are too good, the variety too fun. A different sort of person could say, “Be wary of marrying teenage mothers.”

Does Marie learn over the course of the book? I think not. She does, however, speak, and her voice keeps me reading, and keeps me thinking about Love Me Back after I’ve moved onto other books, other worlds, other words. Marie’s words stay with me. She is like the narrator in True Things About Me or Catherine Millet in The Sexual Life of Catherine M. bizarrely, powerfully honest. I wish I’d read all three books long ago—perhaps the trajectory described in detail here would have been faster. But then again I might not have had the base of knowledge I do know, and into which Marie’s life can be incorporated and seen for what it is, rather than what others wish it to be.

Love Me Back is too intense to be for everyone and yet as you can gather above I love it. Here is an interview with Tierce, and here is a visual review.