Heart Berries

A Memoir

By: Terese Marie Mailhot, Sherman Alexie, Joan Naviyuk Kane

Narrated by: Rainy Fields

Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

Mailhot trusts us 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.

©2018 Terese Marie Mailhot; Introduction copyright 2018 by Sherman Alexie; Afterword copyright 2018 by Joan Naviyuk Kane (P)2018 Tantor

Critic reviews

"To read this book is to engage with one of our very best minds at work." (Toni Jensen, author of From the Hilltop)

"Rainy Fields narrates this deeply original memoir in solemn tones that suit the work.... Mailhot wrote some passages initially as fiction, but says they're now 'bound together and retold as truth.' Fields steadily, surely makes that truth available to listeners." (AudioFile)