![]() ![]() Part poetic love letter, part confession, it is wholly enchanting. Heart Berries is written as a series of connected essays. She writes candidly about losing custody of her first son and about her struggles with mental illness she’s not given to sentimentality about the course of her life, offering herself no excuses. Growing up on the Seabird Island reservation in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley and raised in part in the foster care system, Mailhot married young, became a mother young. Nobody is spared from her unflinching eye, and no one less so than herself. Mailhot explores events in her own life and, in doing so, shines a light on the intergenerational trauma that continues to haunt many residential school survivors and their families. Part love letter, part poem, it is a genre-defying marvel of a memoir. Yet art is exactly what she turns her life into on the pages of Heart Berries. I can’t turn it into Salish art,” writes Terese Marie Mailhot in and about her debut memoir. “The truth of this story 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. ![]()
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