In the fierce lineage of Alissa Nutting's TAMPA amd Katherine Faw Morris' YOUNG GOD, this harrowing tale of systematic female self-destruction proves both hypnotic and frightening. Marie, a Dallas waitress at an upmarket steakhouse, is also a single mother, hooked on drugs and bad sex behind the glittering facade of her practiced professional smile and crisp white apron. A ferocious chronicle of a journey to the end of the night, the novel also manages in its own twisted way to be a tale of self-redemption and realization made all the more fascinating by its heroine's detached view of herself as a character out of reach and understanding as she throws herself recklessly into the arms of the wrong men and the consolations of booze and drugs. Gritty, a refreshing eye-opener about the behind the scenes of the service industry and forms of female masochism, a difficult but courageous book that no male writer I could think of would have had the guts to write with such revelatory honesty.
Marie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle 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.