Merritt Tierce, Love me back. A review by Claudia Mazzilli
Writer and activist Merritt Tierce talks about wounds and censorship on women’s bodies: Love me back (2014)
The despotic domination over Afghan women, ironically, or by analogy, or triggered by those bizarre associations of images peculiar to the oneiric universe, led me to read again a “fierce” novel from a few years ago, fortunately still available on the market for those who want to read it now: Love me back, debut work by the American writer Merritt Tierce. As in dreams (and in nightmares) sensations and memories overlap and crossbreed, so those pages today reemerge to remind us that there are no certainties in women’s empowerments, not even in our patronizing West.
Merritt Tierce’s novel begins in medias res with pages drenched in a realism fully adhering to the most gruesome details, in a narrative made up of serial and recurrent episodes, which even risk eschewing or nauseating the reader: a single mother tells of her life as a waitress (in Dallas) in multiple bars, fast food outlets and restaurants at the same time; the interlocking of shifts in an obsessive déjà-vu of hard work, overtime, collected wages, mostly collected from the percentages on tips, in an organization chart (feudal and hierarchical) of waiters, help-waiters and dishwashers:
By now I had less than two hours of rest at home before starting my shift at the Italian restaurant where I worked in the evening (…) it didn’t make much sense to go back home, and I kept the uniform of the other place in the car precisely because it did happen every now and then. But sometimes even if I could only stay at home for five minutes, I would do it. I would sit on the floor in the bathroom and close the door, even though I was living on my own. To get the feeling that there was something between me and everything else, at least for a few moments
And again: a constant weight loss, the refusal to touch her belly during pregnancy, abuse, harassment or sexual adventures between consenting people (clients, colleagues, employers), cocaine, voluntary terminations of succeeding pregnancies, gestures of self-harm, at first occasionally, then systematic (cuts and burns), in a single long narrative without respite that leaves little room for a few, very short, intense inspirations: the few lines in which she speaks with tenderness of the child born from an unwanted pregnancy; a few paragraphs in which she recounts with disheartened regret about the shattered relationship with Marie’s ex-husband, the boy-father, who kept being caring and kind even after that first fatal erotic exploration inside a single sleeping bag during a trip to Mexico, but he was also too young for that uncertain, lukewarm and immature love and for an unplanned marriage imposed by conventions as a compensation in terms of social reputation.
I burn my neck with a fondue skewer while you watch The Robinsons on my bed (…) The skewer is sharp but I don’t use the spikes. I turn on the stove and hold the metal rod over the blue flame until the plastic handle begins to warm between my fingers and the tip turns red, devilish. I wait for the recorded laugh to start because I know the skin will make a little crackle that I don’t want you to hear but you probably won’t notice anyway. It sounds like a normal cooking noise. I press the metal rod hard on myself and count to three before detaching it. I put it in the dishwasher, with bits of skin stuck on top. It hurts but it feels good. That is, it gives me a feeling of relief. The pain is real and it synchronizes all the pain I have in the rest of myself but that I can’t organize.
It might seem a purely photographic narrative of the discomfort of a woman born in a context with few opportunities for social and cultural redemption: a girl who, in the transient vitalism of sex with casual partners, burns anger and despair but sometimes also naive, adolescent, even virginal curiosity and anxiety, because the awareness of the mechanisms of her own eroticism was not reached with her untimely motherhood.
My confessor was Calvin: every afternoon I told him about my new men and I spared no details, neither on the squalor nor on the dangerousness of what I was doing. He scolded me, called me foolish, showed a concern for me that I wished I could feel too. I didn’t hide from Calvin how much I pretended. I pretended I liked it, I pretended I wanted it, I pretended to come. He didn’t understand and I couldn’t explain it to him. It had something to do with love and something to do with despair. It was like this: sometimes I was crouched on the ground picking up bits of fallen crab balls next to a diamond importer’s shoe, with my apron and my crumb brush and my yes sir, sure, right away, and was paralyzed to see and touch the leftover crabmeat because it wasn’t her bubbly laugh and it wasn’t that spot on her shoulder, right near her neck, that smells of sunshine. I‘m not a mother, I thought as I made my way to the garbage can. You can still fuck a lot of people, Calvin told me, but having fun. Do it for yourself, do it for pleasure. Or at least do it with due precautions. But it wasn’t a question of pleasure: it was that some types of pain are the perfect antidote to others.
But at a certain point the etiology of Marie’s damnation emerges clearly, when she became pregnant: church, school, public institutions formed an alliance, in a circuit of exclusion that expelled the sinner Marie from the earthly paradise of university studies and from every opportunity of professional growth, throwing her into the self-inflicted hell of compulsive promiscuity, self-harm and drug abuse. After giving birth, even the librarian throws her out the door when Marie tries to breastfeed her daughter in the reading room where she occasionally goes to read magazines and biographies in her rare free time. But here is the expulsion from Eden:
When a month and a half after my volunteer mission I take the stage to give the end-of-year speech as a student with the highest grades in the whole school, I still don’t know. I haven’t been keeping a close eye on my period and high school graduation is a messed up time. My parents invite all friends from the church to a backyard barbecue to celebrate my admission to Yale. (…) I also thought that what I had done was wrong.
The elders accept the resignation of the priest in charge of the youth group. In his letter to the faithful of the community he says that he is deeply sorry not to have been able to protect the minors who had been entrusted to him, referring to me I guess.
The elders call me for a private interview in the library. Nine of them and a seventeen-year-old girl. Well, you’re the last person we’d expect this to happen to, says one. I don’t know what the circumstances were, says another, and you don’t even have to tell us. But we all know what boys are like. In the end, it is you girls who have to decide, to make the choices that allow you to maintain chastity and purity.
I am so ashamed, I am so mortified that I leave my body sitting there at the table.
The author of Love me back, Merritt Tierce, grew up in Texas, “in a family of Christian fundamentalists belonging to the Southern Baptist Church” (her own words) and then moved away from Christianity at the birth of her second child. In 2004, Tierce founded the Texas Equal Access Fund, an organization that supports women who cannot afford to have abortions (federal health insurance does not cover abortion in Texas), as well as engaging in legal battles against the restrictions of the right to abortion. Her life, her militancy, her novel (with an ending without redemption) are proof that the feminist achievements of past decades are not guaranteed once and for all, and must be continually claimed, in the white West as well as in the battered East. And it is not a question of measure, of being worse there and better here. For rights there is no piece rate. The rights are either there or they are not.
Excerpts from Love me back, translated from the Italian edition (Carne Viva) by Daniela Travaglini
For Texas Equal Access Fund activities
The situation in Italy at the time of Covid
