Heart Berries: A Memoir [Hardcover]

ANEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER
Selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for March/April 2018
ANew York TimesEditor's Choice
Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction
A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection

A sledgehammer. . . . 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. Parul Sehgal,The New York Times

Heart Berriesby Terese Mailhot is an astounding memoir in essays. Here is a wound. Here is need, naked and unapologetic. Here is a mountain woman, towering in words great and small... What Mailhot has accomplished in this exquisite book is brilliance both raw and refined. Roxane Gay, author ofHunger

Heart Berriesis a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest. 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. The triumphant result isHeart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her fatheran abusive drunk and a brilliant artistwho was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.

Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story,l³.