It's true that the waiter's requisite combination of showmanship and hustle makes for memorable characters, like Danny, a manager who drops "suck it" with Tourette's-like frequency, and Calvin, who maintains his unassailable pride while wringing extra-large tips out of the fact that some customers enjoy being served by a black man. "Love Me Back" is more than a brilliant workplace novel, however. Most of the novel is set in a high-end Dallas steakhouse of the sort whose air is perfumed with the promise of four-figure tips, and Tierce gets lots of mileage out of portraying the backstage antics of waiters who earn something like $3 an hour to watch oil men masticate $300 steaks. A former server, Tierce penned the first of the short stories that eventually became "Love Me Back" after a particularly brutal shift, and she adroitly captures both the intense vitality of the milieu and its funny, nasty, often misogynistic vernacular.
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