Heart Berries: A Memoir
Author(s): Terese Marie Mailhot; Sherman Alexie (Introduction by); Joan Naviyuk Kane (Afterword by)
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Selected by Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick
'Astounding' Roxane Gay
'A sledgehammer' New York Times
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on an Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalised 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.
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.
Memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination. In Heart Berries, Mailhot discovers 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.
Product Information
TERESE MARIE MAILHOT graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an M.F.A. in fiction. Mailhot's work has appeared in The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Times, Carve Magazine, The Offing, The Toast, Yellow Medicine Review, and elsewhere. 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.
General Fields
- :
- : Counterpoint Press
- : Counterpoint Press
- : February 2018
- : February 2018
- : books
Special Fields
- : Terese Marie Mailhot; Sherman Alexie (Introduction by); Joan Naviyuk Kane (Afterword by)
- : Hardback