His inability to comprehend her experience and her inability to abandon her shame are a consistent mark of how the inequalities of their world are pitted against one another. Initially her writing tutor, he is the white male who lurks within the pages simultaneously as a figure of the beloved and a symbol of persecution. The resulting account reads as a series of journal entries, later compiled into short essays and addressed to her second husband, Casey. The telling of this story opens at a point of crisis, when Mailhot, now living in the US, has had herself committed after a breakdown, and is given a notebook in which to record her feelings, her “grand, regal grief”. Mailhot succeeds in telling the ugly truth with rich and beautiful words, sumptuous imagery and an unforgettable speech She was eventually taken into care at 19 she married (“I wanted a safe home”) and at 20 she had her first child, of whom she lost custody while giving birth to her second. Her mother, for whom the memoir is written as a kind of elegy, was a social worker, poet and healer, often absent, frequently made unwell by household mould and an alcoholic, abusive husband, a man who also victimised Mailhot. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle.” The story itself begins on the Seabird Island First Nation Indian reservation in British Columbia, where Mailhot grew up in poverty, “overlooking forty acres of corn … only coyotes in the field, and crows, and wild things”.

“The words were too wrong and ugly to speak.

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.“My story was maltreated,” she begins. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state.

Mailhot trusts us 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.

Heart berries a memoir