Social workers offered me respite – time away from my baby. Like Yanagihara, she touches on something that few dare to think about and even fewer dare describe – What Mailhot does exceptionally well in Heart Berries is describe the anguish and fear associated with motherhood. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution.

In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. …in white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In Heart Berries, Mailhot gives a cultural perspective, however her observations do more than draw attention to the differences between the Native American and white experience. What I admire in memoirs is a fresh angle on universal experiences (in this case love and grief). There’s precision to Mailhot’s language that belies the style of this memoir (non-chronological vignettes which sometimes needed more shape but that’s my only criticism). The words are raw, succinctly capturing her particular tragedies –Įvery bathroom floor is different, but no mourning I do feels familiar. I realized that love can be mediocre and a safe comfort, or it can be unhinged and hurtful. Mailhot reflects on her relationship with her parents, intergenerational trauma, and how difficult it is to love while carrying grief and shame – this is particularly relevant in the context of her relationship with her second husband, Casey, who she both loves and rages against. After a breakdown, she was hospitalised and diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, an eating disorder, and bipolar II disorder. She lost custody of her first child while having her second. Her teens were spent looking for any means of escape.

All of us had substance abuse problems, which are still welcome over the very sober pain of remembering. Her childhood was marked by poverty, abuse, and time in foster care – Heart Berries is Mailhot’s memoir about her coming-of-age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Solutions are simple, and problems are laid out simply. I told you I lock myself in the bathroom to cry when I remember his milk breath… You said you’d be on the other side of the door. I told you about the son who didn’t live with me. When the loss of a child was revealed at the beginning of Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir, Heart Berries, I prepared myself for a tough read. I’ve mentioned a passage in Yanagihara’s A Little Life that haunts me because it gets to the very core of the issue. Stories about losing a child – through death, family separation, to addiction, to crime – hurt my heart more than any other. I have a weak point when reading – the loss of a child.

Heart berries memoir