Heavy with metaphor and personal meditations, Mailhot's story is unveiled. It's one seriously brave memoir, stripping back layer after layer and exposing all the author's pain and struggles underneath - as a woman, as a Native woman, as a survivor of abuse, as someone who has dealt with manic depression, bipolar disorder, an eating disorder and self-harm. With stunning, introspective writing, Mailhot makes the most intimate of confessions.
I'm not surprised it received praise from Roxane Gay because the style reminded me quite a bit of Gay's Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (not quite as polished, but I would watch this space). Heart Berries is a Native American woman's memoir written in short, hard-hitting essays. It requires some patience and close attention - for, though short, this is not the easiest of reads - but it really does pay off. It’s very poetic, dreamy and beautiful, though often fragmented and edging towards stream-of-consciousness in parts. It took me a while to settle into the rhythm of Mailhot's writing in Heart Berries. You should have thought before you made a crazy Indian woman your lover. 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. Heart Berries is 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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