Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

HEART BERRIES

Terese Marie Mailhot

"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... What Mailhot has accomplished in this exquisite book is brilliance both raw and refined." - Roxane Gay, author of Hunger

Heart Berries is the powerful, poetic memoir of Terese Marie Mailhot's of her coming of age, following her as she navigates single motherhood, academia, and relationships during young adulthood. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a tribute to Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners and whose romance with a convicted murderer was portrayed in the controversial Broadway play, and corresponding Paul Simon album, Capeman. It is also 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.

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, and, in so doing, re-establishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.

Terese Marie Mailhot graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an MFA in fiction and is the Saturday Editor at The Rumpus and a columnist for Indian Country Today. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Carve Magazine, The Offing, The Toast, Yellow Medicine Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of several fellowships - SWAIA Discovery Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, Writing by Writers Fellowship, and the Elk Writer's Workshop Fellowship - she was recently named the Tecumseh Post Doctoral Fellow at Purdue University in Indiana.

Available products
Book Published 2018-02-06 by Counterpoint
Book Published 2018-02-06 by Counterpoint

Comments

I was aware within maybe three sentences that I was in the presence of a generational talent. I was in the presence of something new.

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 . . . If Heart Berries is any indication, the work to come [from indigenous writers] will not just surface suppressed stories; it might give birth to new forms.

Mailhot works language like a poet and lets memory and time twist around to elicit from herself deeper truths about childhood trauma, mental illness, Native identity, love, romance, and motherhood.

Unearthing medicine and receiving power requires you to give your life, and in her debut memoir, Mailhot fearlessly delivers. By turns tender, sad, angry, and funny, Heart Berries is a thought-provoking, powerful exploration of what it means to be a contemporary Indigenous woman and mother.

Sometimes a writer's voice is so distinctive, so angry and messy yet wise, that her story takes on the kind of urgency that makes you turn pages faster and faster. Terese Marie Mailhot has one of those voices, and her memoir about being raised on a Canadian reservation and coming to understand what it means to be an indigenous person in modern times is breathtaking. Read more...

There is some word we have not invented yet that means honesty to the hundredth power, that means courage, exponentially extended, that means I will flay myself for my art, for my survival, for my family, to keep breathing, to keep writing, to keep being alive. Inside that opening is beauty beyond all measure, the truth that art was invented to carry, and power enough to light the word. This book is that kind of opening.

Mailhot's memoir is one to sit with and absorb slowly, chapter by chapter . . . It's a beautiful read with a deep emotional breadth.

Inside Terese Mailhot's phenomenal memoir Heart Berries the truth wrestles a knot between hustle and heart. How does a woman raised on a reservation in Canada forge a life story in the face of a culture hell-bent on keeping her quiet and calm? By and through her body, is how, and this woman's body rages, desires, screams and whispers its way into the reader's body, as if to remind us that the rest of the story will not be silenced. Terese radically reinvents language in order to surface what has been murdered by American culture: the body of a woman, the voice of a warrior, the stories of ancestral spirit jutting up and through the present tense. I am mesmerized by her lyricism because it is shot through with funny angry beautiful brutal truths. This is a writer for our times who simultaneously blows up time. Thank oceans.

This gut punch of a memoir . . . essentially a love letter, full of humor and truth, to tough, challenging women everywhere.

UK, C: Bloomsbury ; Canada: Doubleday Canada ; French Canadian: Marchand de Feuilles ; Korean: Iryoil Books ; Spanish: Planeta Mexico

In this debut memoir, Terese Marie Mailhot sends across generations a love letter to women considered difficult. She sends a manifesto toward remembering - culture and heartbreak and laughter. She writes to the men who love these women. She writes prose tight as a perfect sheet, tucked . . . To read this book is to engage with one of our very best minds at work.

Terese Marie Mailhot, author of the memoir Heart Berries, has won a 2019 Whiting Award in Nonfiction! From the Selection Committee: "Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries is one of the most important memoirs of the last five years. There is a purity to this nimble, jarring work. Mailhot writes with a fierce and unyielding commitment to creating an unlikeable - which is to say, fully human - female narrator, speaking to a larger project in contemporary memoir. The plot we follow is actually the narrator's own mind; her intelligence, clarity, honesty, and complexity make this story riveting."

2018 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection

It's just one of those books that demands a second read, and a third, and a fourth. It's a memoir from a First Nations writer in Canada, who grew up on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. She manages to tackle trauma (her family went through Canada's residential school system) and mental health (she had herself committed after a nervous breakdown) in a way that is candid, honest, and sometimes, even strangely comical. I couldn't put it down!" Read more...

Powerful and raw, Heart Berries looks unflinchingly at trauma, love, pain, self-acceptance, and what it means to be a Native woman today.

A B&N Discover Great New Writers Selection An ABA IndieNext Pick for February 2018 Named one of Goodreads Most Anticipated Books of 2018

Mailhot's memoir isn't just another confession of the hells of living with PTSD and BiPolar disorder: it's a woman writing herself out of the darkness and into acceptance of the events in her life.

Heart Berries is an epic take - an Iliad for the indigenous. It is the story of one First Nation woman and her geographic, emotional, and theological search for meaning in a colonial world. It is disturbing and hilarious. It contains sentences of such poetry and power that you will be compelled to set the book down and walk away to recover from the tremors. Terese is a world-changing talent and I recommend this book with 100% of my soul.

Heart Berries is phenomenal. I finished the book and went right back to the beginning to read through once again; my understanding deepened, as did the mystery. Mailhot's voice is so clear, so disruptive, so assured, and always so mesmerizingly poetic - it somehow startles and lulls all at once. I was KNOCKED DOWN.

This book is ache and balm. It is electric honesty and rigorous craft. It concerns a woman who veers into difficult and haunted corners. She meets ghosts and hospitals. She ends up in a mutinous wing of memoir, disobeying all colonial postures, 'neat narratives,' formulas and governments. The resulting story is brave and bewitching. I am so grateful to Terese Marie Mailhot, a fiery new voice, whose words devoured my heart.

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 this without blinking but to say she is fearless would be to miss the point. These essays are too intimate, too absorbing, too beautifully written, but never ever too much. What Mailhot has accomplished in this exquisite book is brilliance both raw and refined, testament.

This stunning, poetic memoir from Terese Marie Mailhot burns like hot coal. I read it in a single feverish session, completely absorbed and transported by Mailhot's powerful and original voice . . . The strength of her writing comes from Mailhot's fearless embrace of emotional darkness and in her depiction of the psychic cost of living in a white man's world.

It is incredibly beautiful... I am just absolutely in love with it...I had to use every ounce of self-control to not sit and read it when it came to my house.

Mailhot's first book defies containment and categorization. In titled essays, it is a poetic memoir told in otherworldly sentences. . . . Not shy, nor raw, nor typical in any way, this is a powerfully crafted and vulnerable account of living and writing about it.

HEART BERRIES is on #10 on the list of the bestselling books in Canada in nonfiction (April 22nd)

Mailhot fearlessly addresses intimately personal issues with a scorching honesty derived from psychological pain and true epiphany. . . . Slim, elegiac, and delivered with an economy of meticulous prose, the book calibrates the author's history as an abused child and an adult constantly at war with the demons of mental illness. An elegant, deeply expressive meditation infused with humanity and grace.