![]() Mailhot married for the first time when she was a teenager, and living on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia, Canada. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalised and facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma.’ It sounded incredibly hard-hitting, and indeed, that is the overarching feeling which I have of the memoir.Īs well as a form of therapy, Heart Berries was written as a ‘memorial’ for the author’s mother, as a way of reconciling with her estranged father, ‘and an elegy of how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.’ In the book, Mailhot finds herself able to discover ‘her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, re-establishes her connection to her family, to her people and to her place in the world.’ Heart Berries is described as ‘a powerful and poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on an Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. ![]() The New York Times calls it a ‘sledgehammer’ of a book, and believes that Mailhot has produces ‘a new model for the memoir.’ I had heard only praise for the book, Mailhot’s debut, and was therefore keen to pick up a copy myself. ![]() ![]() ![]() Roxane Gay has deemed Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir, Heart Berries, ‘astounding’, and it ranks amongst the favourite books of both Kate Tempest and Emma Watson. ![]()
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