Review: Heart Berries

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I received an Advanced Reader Digital Copy of this book from Edelweiss+, and a paper review copy in addition.

In Sherman Alexie's almost effusive introduction to Terese Marie Mailhot's book Heart Berries he glibly (by his own admission) says that Terese puts the "'original' in aboriginal." He obviously has a lot more experience reading the writings of Native Americans, Indigenous, and First Nations writers than I but I can absolutely concur that her writing is truly original and a voice of heartbreaking authenticity. This book is like a prose poem in places and in others is like a crazy quilt of connections to events in Mailhot's life. Some of the passages in this book were originally intended to be polemic fictional accounts of the lives of First Nations/Native women. But Mailhot, according to a wonderful interview with Joan Naviyuk Kane in an Afterword, says she quickly decloaked and began to strip away any fiction from her narrative. What was left behind is raw, painful, and incredibly brave writing reflecting on relationships, loneliness, parenting or lack thereof, mental illness, abuse of all sorts, and gives us a fierce soul surviving and thriving against what seem like steep odds.

While I understand that Mailhot writes with the paradigm of a First Nations woman, she is also writing about the general human condition, with all our awful mistakes, broken families and illusions, our vulnerabilities, and idiosyncrasies. I'm sure there are going to be some who pick up this book and think that this is going to require some esoteric understanding of Native culture or that this is some chick lit memoir. I'm assuring you it doesn't and it's not. This book is filled with powerful stuff. It's as searing and personal as Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey but has a unique voice that is often wry and sometimes even just plain hilarious. Just show up. You won't be sorry. Filled with what she calls the ugliness of life (I refuse to think of it as the ugliness of her life), Mailhot has definitely made a honey reduction. I cannot wait to read more of her work in years to come.

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