Heart Berries: A Memoir

Terese Marie Mailhot

feb 2018 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrado por Rainy Fields

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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.

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Terese Marie Mailhot graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an MFA in fiction. Mailhot's work has appeared in The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Times, Carve Magazine, The Offing, The Toast, Yellow Medicine Review, and elsewhere. She resides in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Rainy Fields is an ensemble member of Native Voices at the Autry, the country's only Equity theater company dedicated to creating and developing new works by Native playwrights. She also cohosts the podcast Hollywood Ndnz, which explores what it's like to be Native and in the entertainment industry.