Heart Berries
A Memoir

Heart Berries by 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. She writes of motherhood, loss, absence, want, suffering, love, mental illness, betrayal, and survival. She does thi......more

You should have thought before you made a crazy Indian woman your lover. It took me a while to settle into the rhythm of Mailhot's writing in Heart Berries. It’s very poetic, dreamy and beautiful, though often fragmented and edging towards stream-of-consciousness in parts. It requires some patien......more

You think weakness is a problem. I want to be torn apart by everything. If you’re a fan of the writing in books like Carmen Marie Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women, you’ll probably adore the writing throughout. For me, the writing didn’t quite work until the en......more

An emotion-driven memoir about a Native American woman's struggles with abuse, mental illness, and survival. Terese Marie Mailhot makes many astute observations in Heart Berries, including how white people use self-esteem as "identity capitalism" and how Indian women are often viewed as inhuman. She......more

Terese Marie Mailhot’s poetic, shapeshifting memoir Heart Berries, a series of tiny impressionistic essays of self-exploration into the very roots of trauma and madness, is as impossible to describe as it is to shake off. Mailhot is a woman at odds with herself and the world, and her book is in a so......more