When Merritt Tierce became pregnant at age nineteen, she was a student at Abilene Christian University who had hopes of attending graduate school. Instead, she was pressured by her Southern Baptist family to marry and become a mother. The tumultuous decade that followed inspired Tierce’s breakout 2014 novel Love Me Back, which features a young mother who has left her marriage and her faith and found a refuge of sorts in the hard-partying Dallas service industry. Tierce herself waited tables for many years.In addition to writing one of the best Texas novels of the twenty-first century, Tierce helped found the abortion nonprofit Texas Equal Access [TEA] Fund, has earned TV writing credits on HBO’s Orange Is the New Black, and penned perhaps the most talked-about…The post ‘It’s An Earthquake’: This Texas Author Has Long Predicted Our Post-Roe Reality appeared first on Texas Monthly.