Merritt Tierce's debut novel, Love Me Back, was acclaimed for its raw emotional force and autofictional precision. In A Life in Men, Tierce turns from fiction to memoir, bringing her trademark radical, unsentimental honesty to an open exploration of love, sex, desire and loneliness. With the stunning prose and jagged humour that distinguished her fiction, she braids the comedies and catastrophes of her romantic and intellectual life, interrogating her first marriage and early motherhood, the dissolution of her second marriage, and the loves and heartbreaks that followed.
From an unplanned pregnancy at nineteen to leaving the conservative Christian community in which she was raised, from her years at Yale Divinity School to a move to Los Angeles to write for Hollywood, Tierce traces her evolving sense of self under patriarchy. At the center of the book is her epic experiment with app-based dating: a humorous, frustrating and at times painful chronicle of 150 first dates that probes how modern romance reshapes intimacy, power and self-worth. 'Believe me, I know I'm the common denominator,' she writes.
A Life in Men confronts abortion, divorce, rape, motherhood, body image, perimenopause and sexuality with analytical rigor, unflinching candour and profound empathy. What emerges is a bracing ode to self-discovery - through faith and its loss, trauma and its aftermath, and the slow accumulation of self-knowledge. In prose that is both fearless and deeply pleasurable to read, Tierce joins the lineage of feminist truth-tellers such as Annie Ernaux, Leslie Jamison, Alison Bechdel and Claire Dederer, offering a memoir that insists self-acceptance is not an endpoint, but an ongoing lifelong reckoning.
