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.
North Texas author Merritt Tierce believes it’s time for a TV series about abortion
The former ‘Orange Is the New Black’ writer wants the setting in a Texas reproductive healthcare clinic.
by Tommy Cummings
Reaction to Merritt Tierce’s recently published essay about abortion just reaffirmed her position that audiences are ready for more stories about the topic.
Tierce, a North Texas native and author, took a deep self-examination into her long-ago decision to not have an abortion in a New York Times Magazine cover story titled “The Abortion I Didn’t Have.”
The response over the essay was overwhelming, Tierce said in an email.
“I have a whole pile of responses from people weeping at their desks and another pile of responses from people weeping in their cars,” Tierce wrote. “I’ve heard from everyone I’ve ever known and tons of strangers. And while it’s nice to see all the compliments about the writing, for the most part, people are expressing gratitude — which is something of a surprise.
“I seem to have said something so many people have connected to, and they’re telling me they haven’t seen these ideas represented enough in the larger conversation about abortion and parenting.”
For the past two years, Tierce has been trying to develop a television program focused on abortion. She was a staff writer for Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black series before its seven-season run ended in 2019 and the experience gave her ideas on the show’s location — a Texas reproductive healthcare clinic.
“The people fighting this fight in Texas are my heroes, and Texas has this amazing history with respect to abortion,” she said. “But I’ve been astonished that even with everything that’s going on with SB8 and the likely overturning of Roe, Hollywood is still pretty chicken when it comes to abortion. There’s still this clenching, this cringing, that I encounter whenever I say the word. We have to get past that!”
She said a show on the topic is “one of the last frontiers in prestige television — we’ve crossed all the other lines when it comes to violence and depravity and war and zombie apocalypses, but the fear and stigma and shame surrounding abortion are still so entrenched that there’s never been a show about it.”
TV has not handled the abortion debate consistently, according to an opinion piece (“How TV lied about abortion”) in Vox by Tanya Melendez, a distinguished fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“For decades, abortion on television was largely depicted as a debate in narrative form, one that pitted melodramatic anti- and pro-abortion rights stances against each other through characters audiences knew and loved,” Melendez wrote.
Melendez said that an abortion plotline barely appeared on TV before 1980, except for a groundbreaking episode of Maude in 1972. Bea Arthur’s character, who was 47, discovered she was pregnant and eventually had an abortion. The show was watched by an estimated 65 million people or nearly one-third of the American population at the time, Melendez reported.
Tierce said: “It’s been encouraging to see that more and more shows and movies will have an abortion storyline or an abortion episode, but I think we need a show as big and longrunning as a Grey’s Anatomy or an Orange Is the New Black, to tell all the stories that can be told.”
She said all kinds of people have abortions for all kinds of reasons, “so it’s a storytelling goldmine. You can never run out of abortion stories.
“But what I’m interested in most is how abortion is situated as a nexus of all these super-powerful forces — politics, healthcare, education, religion — all these institutions in our society and culture that want to control people’s bodies and how people have sex.
“Really, I want to make a show about sex and sexual pleasure as much as a show about abortion.”
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
Interview for Tentaciones in El País
Confieso que una de las cosas que más me llamó la atención del libro es su total ausencia de moralina: las drogas no llevan a la protagonista a un final terrible y su adicción al sexo no culmina con una epifanía estúpida. Es imposible encontrar en tu libro una sola línea donde adviertas sobre el consumo de drogas, recomiendes el uso de anticonceptivos o en la que digas que hay que ser más selectivo con tus amantes. ¿Por qué elegiste algo tan inusual como no tomar partido y no incluir moralejas en tu libro?
Maybe the only idea I feel any certainty about is uncertainty. I am rarely certain about anything, because I understand how hard it is to ever know the whole truth about anything. New information arises, old information proves false, or at some point a different perspective makes sense. I'm not saying one can categorically never be certain about anything; for example I am certain that abortion ought to be a human right. Regarding drug addiction, I think that often people arrive at a greater, truer, fuller understanding of life after making what are thought of as 'bad' decisions, and then living through the consequences of those decisions. So it's not for me to say what someone else should or shouldn't do, because I can't know any other person's entire history or potential. I think this is the fundamental difference that defines the political divide in America, and almost anywhere else there is a cultural divide that falls out as conservatism vs. liberalism: conservatives typically believe they can know what is best for everyone, what is best for an individual they don't know anything about; liberals typically believe that everyone ought to have the freedom to make their own decisions as long as they aren't harming or impeding anyone else. That is, in my opinion, perhaps the only logically sound moral stance one can take, given the reality of individuated consciousness.
An Avatar of Myself
Superstition Review
by Crawford Pederson
MT: And no, I was never uncomfortable with the subject matter. Whatever is hard or dangerous or painful in life contains some truth about the darkness of life; I am uncomfortable with the idea that I might pretend the darkness isn’t there. I am uncomfortable with the reality that women are still not considered fully human, so there is hardly a subject more worth writing about than the subjugation of women. [continue]
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 Art & Commerce
0s&1s Reads
by Andrew Lipstein
AL: The time it took to write Love Me Back, as well as your own block, seem to be in pretty stark contrast to the prose of the novel, which resembles a roaring faucet left on from cover to cover. But I guess that's why it's called fiction, and not all-of-your-anxieties-and-neuroses-in-a-book. How do you mean when you say you've always been superstitious about the issue?
MT: I'm glad to hear the novel feels that way—and I think it does because each chapter was written when two important forces aligned, and not before: the force inherent in a story worth telling and the force of a strong urge to tell it. I would distinguish between waiting for the emergence/alignment of these forces and "waiting for inspiration," which writers are exhorted not to do. I have a deep fear that forcing myself to write, if I'm telling a story that really doesn't bear telling, or if I'm telling it with only a limp, out-of-duty urge to tell it, will result in a story that naturally sucks. [continue]
Recommending Euphoria by Lily King
Women Galore
by The Wild Detectives
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
Oak Cliff Wild Literary Festival
Dallas Noir Authors
by The Wild Detectives
Last Night's Reading
In Conversation with Mary Helen Specht
by Kate Gavino
drawing by Kate Gavino
MIXED MEDIA Inaugural Podcast
Dallas Morning News
by Christopher Wynn
The first episode of a new weekly conversation about what's hot and what's not in local and national culture, hosted by Dallas Morning News culture critic Chris Vognar with FD magazine deputy editor Christopher Wynn and guest host Lauren Smart, arts and culture editor for the Dallas Observer.
Merritt talks about her profile in the May issue of FD magazine of transgender artist and engineer Liz Larsen; Dallas artist and designer Rob Wilson on Welcome to Night Vale and Dirty Weekend.
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]