Alexie Sherman - Heart berries a memoir

advance praise for

Heart berries

Heart Berries by Terese Marie 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.

roxane gay , author of Hunger

Inside Terese Marie Mailhots 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 womans body rages, desires, screams, and whispers its way into the readers 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. lidia yuknavitch , author of
The Book of Joan , The Small Backs of Children ,
Dora: A Headcase , and The Chronology of Water

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.

pam houston , author of
Contents May Have Shifted

Heart Berries is an epic takean 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... Terese is a world-changing talent and I recommend this book with 100 percent of my soul. sherman alexie , author of
You Dont Have to Say You Love Me

In this debut memoir, Terese Marie Mailhot sends across generations a love letter to women considered difficult. She sends a manifesto toward remembering... 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.

toni jensen , author of From the Hilltop

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. Mailhots voice is so clear, so disruptive, so assured, and always so mesmerizingly poeticit somehow startles and lulls all at once. I was KNOCKED DOWN.

justin torres , author of We the Animals

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.

eden robinson , author of
the Scotiabank Giller Prize short-listed novel
Son of a Trickster

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. kyo maclear ,
bestselling author of Birds Art Life

Heart Berries makes me think of a quote I have always loved: Beauty is truth, truth beauty (Keats). With a keen eye for intense truth and thoroughly crafted beauty, Mailhots debut sings like poetry, and stays with you long after youve finished the last page. katherena vermette ,
author of The Break

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 authors 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. Kirkus Reviews

Copyright 2018 by Terese Marie Mailhot

Introduciton copyright 2018 by Sherman Alexie

Afterword copyright 2018 by Joan Naviyuk Kane

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mailhot, Terese Marie, author.

Title: Heart berries : a memoir / Terese Marie Mailhot.

Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2017051069 | ISBN 9781619023345

Subjects: LCSH: Mailhot, Terese MarieHealth. | Post
traumatic stress disorderPatientsNorthwest, Pacific
Biography. | Manic-depressive illnessPatients
Northwest, PacificBiography. | Indian women
Northwest, PacificBiography.

Classification: LCC RC552.P67 M3555 2018 | DDC 362.19685/210092 [B] dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051069

Jacket designed by Donna Cheng
Interior designed by Wah-Ming Chang

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Karen Joyce Bobb (Wahzinak)

I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

maggie nelson

Contents

introduction

by Sherman Alexie

T erese Marie Mailhot arrived in my life via vision. Well, she was due to give birth at any moment and couldnt attend the writing workshop in person, so she was beamed into the classroom via Skype or iChat or Facebook streaming on somebodys laptop. She became the cyborg writer in the room. It was hilarious at first. It never stopped being hilarious. But as the week went on, I realized that Tereses lack of physical presence gave her voice more power. When she spoke, we all had to lean toward the computer to better hear. And then wed sometimes forget she was in the room. Its easy to forget about a computer. But then Terese would speakwould politely seek our attentionand wed turn toward that laptop as if it were a shrine. Hilarious. It all seemed like a contradiction. But that twenty-first-century technology turned Terese into an ancient. Well, it made her feel like she was powered by something ancient.

So, in reading Heart Berries , I was not surprised to learn that Terese, as a child in search of answers, in search of protection, pretended to be ancient.

I didnt say any of this at the time. I didnt want to single her out. Or praise her too much. I was the professor and I needed to be fair, objective, and critical. But what I really wanted to say was, Terese, when I sat down with your manuscript and began to read your words, 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 .