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. 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. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II, Terese Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma.

Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. Guileless and refreshingly honest, Terese Mailhot's debut memoir chronicles her struggle to balance the beauty of her Native heritage with the often desperate and chaotic reality of life on the reservation. Selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for March/April 2018. Named one of the most anticipated books of 2018 by: Chatelaine, Entertainment Weekly, ELLE, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Huffington Post, B*tch, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Bustle, The Rumpus, and Goodreads. Shortlisted for the 2019 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction.Ī New York Public Library best book of 2018. Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.

Winner of the 2019 Whiting Award for Nonfiction. Winner of the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. Winner of the Blue Metropolis First Peoples Prize. Longlisted for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize. Finalist for the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.įinalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Awards.

Heart berries by terese marie mailhot