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A Life in Men

A Memoir

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Pub Date May 4 2027 | Archive Date Jun 4 2027

Doubleday Books | Doubleday


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Description

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, 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...

Advance Praise

“Raw, devastating, brilliant—and relatable. A Life in Men is beautifully written and gorgeously observed.”—Jenji Kohan, creator and writer of Orange Is the New Black

A Life in Men is a tender maelstrom of a memoir. Tierce’s flawless urgent sentences carry us across her years of marriage and motherhood, sex and dating, and the relentless search for a self, gathering force until we reach the the eye of the storm: a space shaped by longing and damage, at once luminous and aching. And did I mention that the book is—improbably!—extraordinarily funny? Nothing short of astonishing— I couldn’t put it down.”—Jamie Quatro, author of Two-Step Devil, a New York Times Editor’s Choice

“An unputdownable succession of brilliant sentences and shimmering insight. Merritt Tierce is a strange, singular, hilarious narrator and our best chronicler of loneliness. A Life in Men is a definitive work of female alienation that will endure well beyond the time it so masterfully captures.”—Kerry Howley, author of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs

“The best book about intimacy and loneliness ever written. With raw and gorgeous prose Tierce captures all that goes unspoken in our daily search to be loved and known. A Life in Men articulates everything I’ve ever wanted to say about men and love—but that I didn’t know was okay to say. Tierce nails the emptiness and heartache of modern love with devastating precision.”—Jen Percy, author of Girls Play Dead

“Raw, devastating, brilliant—and relatable. A Life in Men is beautifully written and gorgeously observed.”—Jenji Kohan, creator and writer of Orange Is the New Black

A Life in Men is a tender...


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Available on NetGalley 

National Review and Media Appearances, including NPR and Newspaper and Magazine Features

Cultural, Feminist, and Literary Media Coverage

Podcast and Newsletter Interviews

Original Essays and Opinion...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9780385552240
PRICE $30.00 (USD)
PAGES 256

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BISAC Codes

BIO026000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
LCO019000 LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Women Authors
SOC041000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Essays