Best Seller
A Life in Men
Hardcover
$30.00
Available on May 04, 2027 | 256 Pages
Merritt Tierce, author of the “dangerous and breathtaking” (Roxane Gay) novel Love Me Back, returns with an explosive memoir about the turbulent relationships with men that have shaped her.
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 stunning prose and the jagged humor 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, refusing sentimentality or self-deception.
A Life in Men confronts abortion, divorce, rape, motherhood, body image, perimenopause, and sexuality with analytical rigor, unflinching candor, 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 reckoning.
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 stunning prose and the jagged humor 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, refusing sentimentality or self-deception.
A Life in Men confronts abortion, divorce, rape, motherhood, body image, perimenopause, and sexuality with analytical rigor, unflinching candor, 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 reckoning.
Author
Merritt Tierce
Merritt Tierce is the author of the novel Love Me Back and a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Foundation Award. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 author and Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award winner and her fiction, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, A Fucking Magazine, Volume 0, Oxford American, Cosmopolitan, Marie-Claire, and elsewhere. She worked as an abortion rights and reproductive justice activist in Texas for ten years before earning an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Los Angeles and wrote for the last two seasons of the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black; in recent years she has been developing various television projects about abortion. She has published numerous essays about abortion, including a 2021 cover story for The New York Times Magazine called “The Abortion I Didn’t Have.”
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