Terese Marie Mailhot has one of those voices, and her memoir about being raised on a Canadian reservation and coming to understand what it means to be an indigenous person in modern times is breathtaking. Sometimes a writer’s voice is so distinctive, so angry and messy yet wise, that her story takes on the kind of urgency that makes you turn pages faster and faster. But give me narrative power and ambition over tidiness any day. … is unsparing to everyone, especially herself.… Her experiments with structure and language …are in the service of trying to find new ways to think about the past, trauma, repetition and reconciliation, which might be a way of saying a new model for the memoir.… So much of what Mailhot is moving toward here still feels nascent-the book wants a tighter weave, more focus. Terese Marie Mailhot's memoir…is a sledgehammer.… Heart Berries has a mixture of vulnerability and rage, sexual yearning and artistic ambition, swagger and self-mockery. ( From the publisher.)ĭon't be fooled by the title. The recipient of several fellowships―SWAIA Discovery Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, Writing by Writers Fellowship, and the Elk Writer’s Workshop Fellowship―she was recently named the Tecumseh Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University and resides in West Lafayette, Indiana. Mailhot’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, Los Angeles Times, Carve Magazine, The Offing, The Toast, Yellow Medicine Review, and elsewhere. Terese Marie Mailhot graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an M.F.A. With an Introduction by Sherman Alexie and an Afterword by Joan Naviyuk Kane. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept.
The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners a story of reconciliation with her father-an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist-who was murdered under mysterious circumstances and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.
Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. A powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest.
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