![]() ![]() 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. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. The book tells the story of Mailhot’s life as a First Nations woman who moves from Canada to the American Southwest, struggles with bipolar disorder, and comes to terms with her past traumas and tumultuous, sometimes violent marriage. ![]() Mailhot trusts us to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. In her debut memoir, Heart Berries (Counterpoint, February 2018), Terese Marie Mailhot reflects on the challenges of negotiating the gap between the ugly truth and the art she hopes to make out of it. ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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