Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviews Merritt for the first episode of a new podcast from The New York Times.
Amanpour & Co. Interview with Michel Martin
Think Interview with Kris Boyd
Krys Boyd interviews Merritt Tierce for the radio show Think, on Dallas NPR station KERA. They discuss Merritt’s recent essay about unplanned pregnancy, and why people have such binary views on the subjects of parenting, motherhood, and abortion, among other topics.
We Need More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television
Instead of making abortion the crux of the plot, Tierce, who is currently working on a scripted television show that takes place in a clinic that provides abortion, is hoping to normalize abortion as just another choice in a wide range of decisions people make throughout their lives. And for characters who have kids, she wants to frame abortion as what it really is: a parenting decision.
“I think the most radical reconception that needs to happen with respect to abortion, especially parenting people who have abortions, is for people to realize that it can be a serious act of love to have an abortion,” she says. “And for people who have kids, that is the number one decision-making factor. If they feel like they can’t handle another child, what’s driving that decision is the desire to give the children they already have the best possible life.”
Abortion On Screen: Hollywood Health & Society Panel
Northshire Live: In Conversation with Christa Parravani, LOVED AND WANTED
'The Future Of Literature': Whiting Awards Celebrate 10 Emerging Writers
"Every year, our corps of expert anonymous nominators point us to some of the most exciting and vital work happening today," Courtney Hodell, who oversees the awards, explained in a statement released Wednesday. "These names may be new to us, but they're writing the future of literature in this country."
The winners announced at a ceremony Wednesday night in New York City, listed in alphabetical order, are: poet Kayleb Rae Candrilli, poet Tyree Daye, novelist Hernan Diaz, playwright Michael R. Jackson, nonfiction writer Terese Marie Mailhot, nonfiction writer Nadia Owusu, short fiction writer Nafissa Thompson-Spires, novelist Merritt Tierce, poet Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and playwright Lauren Yee.
WGA Panel Explores Challenges of Writing Women's Reproductive Issues
One of the most disturbing problems, said panelists, is that television can misrepresent womens' experiences and perpetuate misconceptions. For example, though one in three women will experience an abortion in her lifetime – or 60% of the female population – television tends to portray terminating a pregnancy as a life-shattering anomaly rather than a common experience.
“It’s a simple procedure, not as medicalized as we see it depicted on television and in film,” said Orange is the New Black writer Merritt Tierce. “I’d like to see that story depicted.” [continue]
Panelists (L-R): Moderator Dr. Zoanne Clack (Grey’s Anatomy), Sascha Rothchild (GLOW), Dr. Raegen McDonald-Mosley (Planned Parenthood), Merritt Tierce (Orange is the New Black), Chai Chai Sun (menopause expert), and Bruce Miller (The Handmaid’s Tale).
photograph by Mai Tran-Lanza
On The Struggle To Write and Make Money
KERA's Friday Conversation
by Rick Holter
MT: I actually loved delivering the mail. I wanted to do it because I thought this is a job that’s physical and you don’t have to talk to anyone and someone will give you money for walking around all day, not talking to people and putting letters in mailboxes. It sounded beautiful to me and it really was exactly what I expected. [continue]
On Writing and Restaurant Labor
Public Books
by Patrick Abatiell
First things first: Tierce is a staggeringly good prose writer. Her novel is successful in large part due to the capacious, rambunctious intelligence she lends to her narrator, who is, as a character, a marvel of self-awareness and self-exposure. She muses, for instance, on a lover: “The strength in him was panther-dark and menacing and in spite of the ordinary green lines across the toes of his dress socks I was too scared of him to get wet.” It is possible, of course, to disappoint without surprising, and in this way critics have tended to refer to these evocations of female sexuality as “shocking,” or to use them as evidence of the novel’s “grittiness.” Love Me Back is not, however, a novel that invests much in shock value. It is impelled, instead, by a shrewd understanding of the world it inhabits. Its attention is unflinching, certainly, but it is also diagnostic, analytical, and wise. [continue]
10 Writers to Watch (and Read)
Texas Monthly
by Skip Hollandsworth
One thing that has impressed many readers is that Tierce didn’t come up with a sugarcoated ending. Toward the end of the book, when Marie is asked about her philosophy of life, she says, “Don’t bitch. Just adapt. Nothing is going to go right and everything is going to be hard.” [continue]
photograph by Leann Mueller
Last Night's Reading
In Conversation with Mary Helen Specht
by Kate Gavino
drawing by Kate Gavino
The Subversive Brilliance of A LITTLE LIFE
The New Yorker
by Jon Michaud
One of the few recent novels that’s comparable to “A Little Life” in this respect is Merritt Tierce’s “Love Me Back,” a fierce book about a self-destructive Texas waitress who cuts and burns herself, abuses drugs, and submits herself to debasing sexual encounters. But that novel, at a mere two hundred pages, is a slim silver dagger, not the broadsword that Yanagihara wields. And unlike Tierce’s book, in which there is little reprieve for the reader, Yanagihara balances the chapters about Jude’s suffering with extended sections portraying his friendships and his successful career as a corporate litigator. [continue]
Show Me Something Beautiful
Nat. Brut
by Kayla AE
MT: [Religion] was everything. Now it’s nothing, and that is my gift to myself every day. For evangelical righteousness to work you have to have a bedrock conception of yourself as fucked. Otherwise you don’t need saving. When I walked away from the practice of religion I let myself just be a person. A bipedal mammal with no god to serve or disappoint. Just a being with an unknown, unnumbered store of days ahead before it’s over, before I’ve found all the beauty I’ll ever find, which is the closest thing to a spiritual pursuit I need. Show me something beautiful, play me something beautiful, that’s why I’m here. No purpose and no reason beyond that. Just a human animal with kids to raise and stories to tell. [continue]
A Writer Grows Up
Dallas Observer
by Lauren Smart
The Dallas Observer's annual Masterminds awards recognize local arts & culture visionaries with a cash prize presented at Artopia, a party with a fashion show, live music, artists' booths, and installations by each Mastermind.
MT: I think like a lot of writers early in their careers, you just expect that it will never happen because that seems like the most logical thing, Tierce says. It's been fucking fantastic. Just to have strangers read your book and think about it so hard and appreciate the things you love about it is amazing. [continue]
photograph by Can Turkyilmaz
On Her Path to Becoming a Writer
The Advocate
by Rachel Stone
MT: I just wanted to write what I wanted to write. I didn’t want to write for anyone else. So instead of doing things to make it as a writer, I tried to make money. I’m really glad I did it that way now. I wasn’t writing toward anything for a long time. I just was living, really. [continue]
photograph by Danny Fulgencio
Prose That Scalds
WYSO's Book Nook
by Vick Mickunas
As Marie gradually melts down in a cascade of drugs and meaningless sex this reviewer was withering right along with her. [continue]
On Losing Her Religion
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
by Catherine Mallette
MT: That's when everything started to break down, for me. I felt like I could handle the belittlement and subjugation and discrimination myself, but I resisted absolutely the part where I was supposed to begin indoctrinating my children to believe any of it. [continue]
Full of Sex and Struggle
Iowa Public Radio's Talk of Iowa
by Charity Nebbe
Merritt Tierces’ debut novel, Love Me Back, was inspired in part by her own struggle with “body politics.” [continue]