A sin committed and a prayer answered, you said. “Heart Berries” has a mixture of vulnerability and rage, sexual yearning and artistic ambition, swagger and self-mockery that recalls Chris Kraus’s “I Love Dick.” Mailhot writes of a friend: “She thinks my husband doesn’t understand how to communicate love, and I think he’s impotent.” Later, of Casey: “I wanted to know what I looked like to you. He survived, but met a violent death soon enough, killed in a brawl over a prostitute or, some say, a cigarette. Her satanic father, incarcerated after he and four other men abducted a girl, was so terrifying that Mailhot’s maternal grandmother saved up money to hire a hit man to kill him. Her affectionate but absent mother brought home men who preyed upon her children. Mailhot’s early life was pocked with poverty, addiction and abuse. She wrote her way out of the chaos of her past, asking: “How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time?” She began working on it when she had herself committed after a breakdown.

These phantoms speak throughout Mailhot’s book - they speak through her. So many children reportedly starved to death there, the nuns ran out of places to bury them their bones were hidden in the walls of a new boarding school under construction. Mailhot’s grandmother went to one such school. Members of her family had passed through Canada’s brutal residential school system, which separated indigenous children from their families and cultures, and, in some cases, subjected them to physical and sexual abuse. She grew up on Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. In a book slender enough to slide into your back pocket, Mailhot reckons with the wages of intergenerational trauma. Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir, published under the romantic, rather forgettable name “Heart Berries,” is a sledgehammer. His high praise of Terese Marie Mailhot, her book, and her writing may pre-shape the reader's impressions of.Don’t be fooled by the title. Sherman Alexie's introduction acts as both a preview and an advance review for Heart Berries. Alexie believes that 'Terese and her stories will put back together' (xviii).

Terese is 'unafraid' and 'wants to 'be torn apart by everything'' (xviii). Alexie believes that Mailhot's work and her talent holds up a metaphorical mirror so that both she and readers can see their inner reflections. He also describes Heart Berries as more than a memoir, calling it 'poetry,' 'meditation,' and full of 'hard-earned blue-collar mysticism' (xvii). He writes that she is 'speaking from an ancient place' and describes her as 'a generational talent' (xvi).

The introduction to Heart Berries is written by Sherman Alexie, a lauded Native American writer who was also Terese Marie Mailhot's professor.

Heart berries book