Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

Audiobook, read February 2021

I recently finished listening to Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, which I think was not the best way to receive this book. I have pretty strong feelings about posting un-positive book reviews, and I generally tend to avoid doing so, so I’ve been waffling about posting this, but here we go. I think this book is beautifully crafted and essential, so I’ll start with just sharing the description:

Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. 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. 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.

I think part of the art of this book is in its unsteady syntax, in Mailhot’s visceral approach to truth in all its impossibility. There is a beautiful Q&A at the end of the audiobook, an interview with Mailhot, and what she says about her writing process is truly amazing. But this book, or the audiobook I listened to, didn’t capture the power of the book. I’m going to keep this on my list to read on paper someday, because in listening to the audiobook it felt like I was losing out on the experience of the book.