Heart berries : a memoir

Title:

Author:

Mailhot, Terese Marie, author.

ISBN:

9781619023345

Personal Author:

Mailhot, Terese Marie, author.

Publication Information:

Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, [2018]

Physical Description:

xvi, 142 pages ; 21 cm

Contents:

Indian condition -- Heart berries -- Indian sick -- In a pecan field -- Your black eye and my birth -- I know I'll go -- Little Mountain Woman -- The leaving deficit -- Thunder Being Honey Bear -- Indian condition -- Better parts.

Personal Subject:

Mailhot, Terese Marie-Health.

Subject Term:

Post-traumatic stress disorder -- Patients -- Northwest, Pacific -- Biography.

Manic-depressive persons -- Northwest, Pacific -- Biography.

Indian women -- Northwest, Pacific -- Biography.

Post-traumatic stress disorder -- Patients -- Northwest, Pacific -- Biography -- Juvenile literature.

Genre:

Autobiographies.

Document ID:

SD_ILS:2291355

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Collection	Collection	Call Number	Status
Searching... Auberry Branch Library (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Non-fiction Area	362.19685 MAI	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Clovis Branch Library (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Non-fiction Area	362.19685 MAI	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Hanford Branch Library (Kings Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Non-Fiction Area	362.19685 M	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Mariposa Branch Library (Mariposa Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Non-fiction	362.196 MAI	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Merced Main Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Non-Fiction	362.196 MAI	Searching... Unknown
Searching... North Fork Branch (Madera Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Biography Section	MAILHOT	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Oakhurst Branch (Madera Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Biography Section	MAILHOT	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Springville Library (Tulare Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Biography	B MAILHOT	Searching... Unknown
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Summary

A powerful, poetic memoir of an Indigenous woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest--this New York Times bestseller and Emma Watson Book Club pick is "an illuminating account of grief, abuse and the complex nature of the Native experience . . . at once raw and achingly beautiful (NPR).

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.

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, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.

Author Notes

Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. Her work has appeared in Guernica , Elle , Granta , Mother Jones , Medium , Al Jazeera , the Los Angeles Times , and Best American Essays . She is the New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries: A Memoir . Her book was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction, and was selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for March/April 2018. Her book was also the January 2020 pick for Now Read This, a book club from PBS Newshour and The New York Times . Heart Berries was also listed as an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year, and was one of Harper's Bazaar's Best Books of 2018. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, and she is also the recipient of the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University.

Reviews (4)

Booklist Review

Mailhot's first book defies containment and categorization. In titled essays, it is a poetic memoir told in otherworldly sentences and richly experiential memories that occupy a nearly physical space. A friend and former student of Sherman Alexie, who contributes this book's introduction, Mailhot approaches the complications of writing while Native: As an Indian woman, I resist the urge to bleed out on the page, to impart the story of my drunken father. What expectations must she fulfill, or subvert? Mailhot writes stories of her parents and children; of her youthful marriage, subsequent divorce, and her son who was taken from her. Many pieces address her lover, a break with whom catalyzes her hospitalization, where journaling and remembering become medicine. She tells the story of the first medicine man, in actuality a child called Heart Berry Boy, who, in seeking relief from grief over his mother's death, devoted his life to healing others. Not shy, nor raw, nor typical in any way, this is a powerfully crafted and vulnerable account of living and writing about it.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist

Guardian Review

A bestselling portrayal of sexual abuse, racial cruelty and addiction is enlivened by wry, deadpan humour and an account of a strong mother-daughter bond It is difficult, virtually impossible, in this time not to read art against a political backdrop. Voices of difference or dissent are necessary for their reminder of what is being attacked and why we must fight. The danger is that the voice itself gets lost in its greater significance, and we do not hear it clearly, its specific cadences and particularities, what distinguishes it from another in the same camp. The camp becomes the voice. From the first few lines of Terese Mailhots bestselling debut memoir, it is clear that homogenisation will not be tolerated. This is a voice so distinct in tone, texture and personality that the community from which it springs is immediately rendered secondary. Mailhot writes compassionately from deep within the Native experience, never losing sight of her responsibility towards its telling, never losing sight of herself. The personal is indeed political. My story was maltreated, she begins. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle. The story itself begins on the Seabird Island First Nation Indian reservation in British Columbia, where Mailhot grew up in poverty, overlooking forty acres of corn only coyotes in the field, and crows, and wild things. Her mother, for whom the memoir is written as a kind of elegy, was a social worker, poet and healer, often absent, frequently made unwell by household mould and an alcoholic, abusive husband, a man who also victimised Mailhot. She was eventually taken into care; at 19 she married (I wanted a safe home); and at 20 she had her first child, of whom she lost custody while giving birth to her second. Mailhot succeeds in telling the ugly truth with rich and beautiful words, sumptuous imagery and an unforgettable speech The telling of this story opens at a point of crisis, when Mailhot, now living in the US, has had herself committed after a breakdown, and is given a notebook in which to record her feelings, her grand, regal grief. The resulting account reads as a series of journal entries, later compiled into short essays and addressed to her second husband, Casey. Initially her writing tutor, he is the white male who lurks within the pages simultaneously as a figure of the beloved and a symbol of persecution. His inability to comprehend her experience and her inability to abandon her shame are a consistent mark of how the inequalities of their world are pitted against one another. When they fight about her habitual killing of ladybirds, it is not just about ladybirds: I dont think you know how poor I used to be that my house was infested with ladybugs for so long. My brother and I went mad when they wouldnt stop biting. A few pages on, she writes, less bitter than mournful: I feel dormant watching you live fuller than I can. While in hospital, Mailhot is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, an eating disorder and bipolar II. Of mental illness also, her voice speaks as a singular lament within the larger stigmatised area of human suffering. In one or two stringently precise sentences she expresses the absurdity of diagnosis, the polarising effect of naming something in medical terms that is, in part, experienced, even engendered, spiritually. I couldnt distinguish the symptoms from my heart, she states, and it is entirely logical. A cool lucidity reigns throughout, from a soul in turmoil insisting on its own legitimacy, thereby reclaiming its power. Sometimes suicidality doesnt seem dark; it seems fair, she says frankly, encasing all the tragedy of that thought in the safety of its sentence. This is a slim book full of raw and ragged pain, the poisonous effects of sexual abuse, of racial cruelty, of violence and self-harm and drug addiction. But it is not without a wry, deadpan humour and clever derision. Its quiet rage is directed outwards towards the intangible yet definitive (white supremacy, male supremacy), the unjust shape of the world, while a deep tenderness and empathy are shown to those who share in the authors vulnerability her sons, her mother, even her father: I dont think he was wrong for demanding love it was the manner in which he asked, and whom he asked that was unforgivable. Her mother, in all her dysfunction, her societal powerlessness, is portrayed as a kind of quirky triumph of parenting against the odds, serving her children badly cooked wild rice, encouraging them to beat pillows or rugs when misbehaving, because she wanted us to release our tensions. The result of this wise yet flailing caring is a spiritual mother-daughter bond that continues beyond the grave. Mailhot alludes at one point to her desire and her felt duty as a Native writer to convey the humanity of her people and subvert stereotypes. She has succeeded by telling the ugly truth with rich and beautiful words, sumptuous imagery and an unforgettable speech. This is a startling book. - Diana Evans.

Kirkus Review

Reflections on the turbulent life of a Native American writer.A glowing introduction from Sherman Alexie dubs Mailhot, the Saturday editor for the Rumpus, the "biological child of a broken healer and a lonely artist," and her debut memoir undeniably embodies those attributes. She was raised on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia, and her innocent youth was spent within the orbit of a doting grandmother. The author chronicles her teenage marriage to Vito, the loss of her son Isadore in court upon the birth of second son Isaiah, and how they each "ruined each other, and then my mother died." Mailhot fearlessly addresses intimately personal issues with a scorching honesty derived from psychological pain and true epiphany. She discusses her precarious affair with a writing professor, visits with her psychotherapist, who tempered her manic depression with a stay at a psychiatric facility (the "madhouse"), her prideful work as a distinguished Indian writer, and the abuses of her callous, cynical mother and "drunk savant" father. The author's bipolar condition disrupted many of her formative relationships with new men she introduced to Isaiah, only to have them fade into obscurity. She shares these anecdotes through lyrical, brooding, vastly introspective language. Her prose expresses the urgency of her life in clipped, poetic sentences that snap and surge with grief and intensive reflection. Mailhot's proclamations about her heritage, its traits, and particularly the restlessness and codependency of Indian women permeates the text: "Native women walk alone from the dances of our youth into homes they don't know for the chance to be away." Her moral crisis emerges as not one of overcoming the shame of her past, but how to live and love while reconciling her need for both connection and independence. 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

"Indian girls can be forgotten so well they can forget themselves." After reading Mailhot's 160 pages or listening to not-quite-four hours narrated by Rainy Fields, forgetting is not an option. Presented as an essay collection, Mailhot's work lays bare her experiences as a Native American woman fighting for her life: "I won't be an Indian relic for any readership." Surviving a violent father and neglectful mother, Mailhot escaped foster care by marrying as a teenager. She lost custody of her first son while pregnant with her second. Her marriage ended, she had affairs, and she married her unreliable lover with whom she had another son. Suffering from an eating disorder and mental illness, Mailhot was hospitalized. There, a nurse gave her a ballpoint pen and a composition book into which she "produced so much work." Her writing becomes her savior. Fields, herself a registered member of the Muskogee Creek Nation of Cherokee descent, is Mailhot's complementary conduit, intuiting the subtle rhythms of her wrenching debut. The afterword Q&A with poet Joan Naviyuk Kane is exceptionally revealing. VERDICT Already a best seller-as the March/April selection for Emma Watson's "Our Shared Shelf" book club, audiences should grow ex-ponentially. Savvy readers will be library-bound in droves.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

INDIAN CONDITION 1 My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle. He marked it as solicitation. The man took me shopping with his pity. I was silenced by charity--like so many Indians. I kept my hand out. My story became the hustle. Women asked me what my endgame was. I hadn't thought about it. I considered marrying one of the men and sitting with my winnings, but I was too smart to sit. I took their money and went to school. I was hungry and took more. When I gained the faculty to speak my story, I realized I had given men too much. The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless. We sometimes outrun ourselves. I stopped answering men's questions or their calls. Women asked me for my story. My grandmother told me about Jesus. We knelt to pray. She told me to close my eyes. It was the only thing she asked me to do properly. She had conviction, but she also taught me to be mindless. We started recipes and lost track. We forgot ingredients. Our cakes never rose. We ate ramen every day and often left boiling pots of water on the burner. When she died nobody noticed me. Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves. My mother brought healers to our home and I thought she was trying to exorcise me--a little ghost. Psychics came. Our house was still ruptured. I started to craft ideas. I wrapped myself in a Pendleton blanket and picked blueberries. I pretended I was ancient. A healer looked at me. He was tall and his jeans were dirty.He knelt down. I thought I was in trouble, so I told him that I had been good. He said, "You don't need to be nice." My mother said that was when I became trouble. That's when my nightmares came. A spinning wheel, a white porcelain tooth, a snarling mouth, and lightning haunted me. My mother told me they were visions. "Turn your shirt backwards to confuse the ghosts," she said, and sent me to bed. My mother insisted that I embrace my power. On my first day of school I bound myself a small book. The teacher complimented my vocabulary and my mother told me school was a choice . She fed me traditional food. I went to bed early every night, but I never slept well. I fell ill with tuberculosis. Mother brought back the healers. I told them my grandmother was speaking to me. I made stories of our cooking mistakes and told them I couldn't eat anymore. I missed her food too much. "Does that happen to you," I said. "What?" Zohar, a tarot reader, asked. "Did you ever want to stop eating?" "No," she said. She asked my mother if she could sleep next to my bed, on the floor. She listened to me all night. Storytelling. What potential there was in being awful. My mindlessness became a gift. I didn't feel compelled to tell any moral tales or ancient ones. I learned how story was always meant to be for Indian women: immediate and necessary and fearless, like all good lies. My story was maltreated. I was a teenager when I got married. I wanted a safe home. Despair isn't a conduit for love. We ruined each other and then my mother died. I had to leave the reservation. I had to get my GED. I left my home because welfare was making me choose between my baby's formula or oatmeal for myself. I chose neither, and used one check for a ticket away. That's when I started to illustrate my story and exactly when it became a means of survival. The ugly truth is that I lost my son Isadore in court. The Hague Convention. The ugly of that truth is that I gave birth to my second son as I was losing my first. My court date and my delivery aligned. In the hospital, they told me that my first son would go with his father. "What about this boy," I said, with Isaiah in my arms. "They don't seem interested yet," my lawyer said. I brought Isaiah home from the hospital, and then packed Isadore's bag. My ex-husband Vito took him, along with police escorts. Before they left, I asked Vito if he wanted to hold his new baby. I don't know why I offered, but he didn't kiss our baby or tell him goodbye. He didn't say he was sorry, or that it was unfortunate. Who wants one boy and not another? It's too ugly--to speak this story. It sounds like a beggar. How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time? I learned how to make a honey reduction of the ugly sentences. Still, my voice cracks. I packed my baby and left my reservation. I came from the mountains to an infinite and flat brown to bury my grief. I left because I was hungry. In my first writing classes, my professor told me that the human conditionwas misery. I'm a river widened by misery, and the potency of my language is more than human. It's an Indian condition to be proud of survival, but reluctant to call it resilience. Resilience seems ascribed to a human conditioning in white people. The Indian condition is my grandmother. She was a nursery teacher. There are stories that she brought children to our kitchen, gave them laxatives, and then put newspaper on the ground. She squatted before them, and made faces to illustrate how hard they should push. She dewormed children this way, and she learned that in residential school--where parasites and nuns and priests contaminated generations of our people. Indians froze trying to run away, and many starved. Nuns and Priests ran out of places for our bones, so they built us into the walls of new boarding schools. I can see Grandmother's face in front of those children. Her hands felt like rose petals and her eyes were soft and round like buttons. She liked carnations and canned milk. She had a big heart for us kids. She transcended resilience, and actualized what Indians weren't taught to know: we are unmovable. Time seems measured by grief and anticipatory grief, but I don't think she even measured time. HEART BERRIES 2 You had a hard on for my oratory. Some of my stories were fabricated. I had authority--a thing that people like you haven't witnessed. It comes from a traditional upbringing, and regarding my work as something more sacred than generations of effort or study. It's something on a continuum, so far reaching you know it came from an inhuman place. Story is inhuman and beyond me, and I'm not sure you ever recognized that. You knew to be excited in proximity to my power. We started the affair in a small booth at Village Inn. I didn't sleep the night before. You were my teacher, and we discussed my fiction. My work was skeletal, before you. I waited for the right silence, and then said flatly that I liked you. "Do we get a hotel?" you said. Your hands were shaking. I reached out and touched them--they were double mine and whiter. I knew, before I was close to you, that your cotton, blue hoodie smelled like smoke, and I could put my entire body beneath it. I knew that your skin wasn't rough. I knew that I was not going to be the same person for loving you. We went back to our respective lives. We agreed to talk about it sometime soon. It was winter. I wore a brown corduroy jacket most days, and I remember waiting to be with you--putting my fingers in the jacket pockets until the pockets couldn't contain my incessant want. My fingers felt swollen with focus and desire. I remember pulling threads, looking in the mirror, and seeing myself how you might see me. New.While I waited, I went on a trip with a man I barely liked. You didn't call for two days. He insisted on sleeping in the same bed in our cabin. Our room had a skylight. I couldn't enjoy anything without acknowledging he was in the room. I tried to bathe alone and he played a guitar on the other side of the door. I was bored and asked for horses. "What?" he said. "I want to be on a horse," I said. We were somewhere mountainous and it was snowing. He spent the morning calling stalls and asking for rates. He seemed offended when I told him I needed a warmer sweater, matching gloves, and that the breakfast we had wasn't right. And that I might need wool socks as well. He seemed surprised that I was not fun loving. I was rude and gratuitous. I went horseback riding with the man. He was almost jaundiced--he was so sick in love with me. I wanted as much of the world as I could take, and I didn't have the conscience to be ashamed. You messaged me when I was playing slots with the man. You messaged that you had left your girlfriend, for me. You asked me how soon we could meet. I told the man I was ready to go home. It was urgent. He planned to go ice-skating, but I said no. He planned a tour of a haunted house, but I said no. The man I had been conditioning was not happy with me. He knew something was wrong, and that's when I wondered if maybe falling in love looked like a crisis to an observer. You had a jawline and I wanted to crawl under your gaze--under your chin. I was desirous to be beneath you. The first few nights you tell me things. "I'd burn my life down for you," you said. There was still so much to tell you--things too ugly to know or say. I wanted to know what I looked like to you. A sin committed and a prayer answered, you said. You looked like a hamburger fried in a donut. You were hairy and large. Falling in love felt fluid. It snowed when we fell in love. Everything reminded me of warm milk. Everything seemed less real. I thought my cup was overflowing. I found myself caressing my own face. My son and I let you visit. I told him my friend was coming. He put on a Batman costume and hid behind the couch until you came. "When is he coming?" Isaiah said. "Any minute," I said. When you arrived, Isaiah sprung out and stood quietly. You received him so well. You let him be weird. He was seven, and his fingers were perpetually sticky. My son was a smaller bolt of lightning--uncontained and sweeter than me. You were patient with him, and I watched you both put together a Lego set. Safety wasn't familiar--not with men. Our life felt brighter together. We started to argue about autonomy, and the agency I lacked with you. Neither one of us could pull away, so things erupted. Both of us had jobs and commitments. Our lives became less productive when productivity was pivotal. Excerpted from Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.