We ruined each other.” When her mother dies and Mailhot loses custody of her first child, Isadore, just as she is delivering her second child, she leaves her reservation in grief and hunger. She has already endured a childhood of poverty, neglect, and abuse now ending is a teenage marriage of which she says simply, “Despair isn’t a conduit for love.
In keeping with a kind of poetic efficiency that marks Mailhot’s work, the book opens right into a rupture. All the tensions Mailhot manages here - between what she has lived and what she makes of it, between the ugliness of experience and the graceful, spare prose she uses to convey it, and between how people are with how they might have been - make Heart Berries a standout in the genre. In these pages, the harrowing truth of her young life is balanced by a voice as even and precisely controlled as poetry. I can’t turn it into Salish art.” Yet Mailhot, a member of the Seabird Island Band and the daughter of a poet-activist and a Salish artist, has written one of the most simply beautiful memoirs of inherited trauma, mental illness, motherhood, and love that I’ve read in recent memory. “The truth of this story,” she writes, “is a detailed thing, when I’d prefer it be a symbol or a poem - fewer words, and more striking images to imbue all our things. 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.
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