Heart berries A Memoir
Record details
- ISBN: 9781619024236 (electronic bk)
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Physical Description:
electronic
electronic resource
remote
1 online resource - Publisher: 2018.
Content descriptions
Reproduction Note: | Electronic reproduction. LaVergne : Counterpoint, 2018. Requires OverDrive Read (file size: N/A KB) or Adobe Digital Editions (file size: 629 KB) or Kobo app or compatible Kobo device (file size: N/A KB) or Amazon Kindle (file size: N/A KB). |
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Subject: | Nonfiction Biography & Autobiography Multi-Cultural Politics |
Genre: | Electronic books. |
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Electronic resources
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2017 December #1
Mailhot's first book defies containment and categorization. In titled essays, it is a poetic memoir told in otherworldly sentences and richly experiential memories that occupy a nearly physical space. A friend and former student of Sherman Alexie, who contributes this book's introduction, Mailhot approaches the complications of writing while Native: "As an Indian woman, I resist the urge to bleed out on the page, to impart the story of my drunken father." What expectations must she fulfill, or subvert? Mailhot writes stories of her parents and children; of her youthful marriage, subsequent divorce, and her son who was taken from her. Many pieces address her lover, a break with whom catalyzes her hospitalization, where journaling and remembering become medicine. She tells the story of the first medicine man, in actuality a child called Heart Berry Boy, who, in seeking relief from grief over his mother's death, devoted his life to healing others. Not shy, nor raw, nor typical in any way, this is a powerfully crafted and vulnerable account of living and writing about it. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews. - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2018 February
Reflecting on a haunted pastBookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, February 2018
This stunning, poetic memoir from Terese Marie Mailhot burns like hot coal. I read it in a single feverish session, completely absorbed and transported by Mailhot's powerful and original voice. Mailhot's storyâwhich extends from an impoverished childhood on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia through foster care, teenage motherhood and mental illnessâcould seem a painful litany of misfortune were it not for the transformative alchemy of her art.
Sherman Alexie, in his introduction to this memoir, calls Heart Berries "an Iliad for the indigenous," and recognizes Mailhot as a striking new voice in First Nation writing. The strength of her writing comes from Mailhot's fearless embrace of emotional darkness and in her depiction of the psychic cost of living in a white man's world. For example, after Mailhot's mother has an intense epistolary love affair with convicted murderer Salvador Agron, her words and memories are used by the musician Paul Simon for his musical The Capeman, in which her character is reduced to an "Indian hippie chick." Mailhot herself falls in precipitous love with her writing teacher, a passion that initially lands her in a mental ward.
Although diagnosed with bipolar II, post-traumatic stress disorder and an eating disorder, Mailhot links her illness to something she calls "Indian sick," which is as historical as it is individual. There is "something feminine and ancestral" in her illness, which requires an acknowledgment of the generational trauma of First Nation people. Storytelling, Mailhot feels, is a first step toward healing both the individual and her people.
Situating her physical and psychic pain in context with a multigenerational focus, Mailhot crafts an intensely moving story about mothers and what they pass down to their children.
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This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Copyright 2018 BookPage Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2017 December #1
Reflections on the turbulent life of a Native American writer.A glowing introduction from Sherman Alexie dubs Mailhot, the Saturday editor for the Rumpus, the "biological child of a broken healer and a lonely artist," and her debut memoir undeniably embodies those attributes. She was raised on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia, and her innocent youth was spent within the orbit of a doting grandmother. The author chronicles her teenage marriage to Vito, the loss of her son Isadore in court upon the birth of second son Isaiah, and how they each "ruined each other, and then my mother died." Mailhot fearlessly addresses intimately personal issues with a scorching honesty derived from psychological pain and true epiphany. She discusses her precarious affair with a writing professor, visits with her psychotherapist, who tempered her manic depression with a stay at a psychiatric facility (the "madhouse"), her prideful work as a distinguished Indian writer, an d the abuses of her callous, cynical mother and "drunk savant" father. The author's bipolar condition disrupted many of her formative relationships with new men she introduced to Isaiah, only to have them fade into obscurity. She shares these anecdotes through lyrical, brooding, vastly introspective language. Her prose expresses the urgency of her life in clipped, poetic sentences that snap and surge with grief and intensive reflection. Mailhot's proclamations about her heritage, its traits, and particularly the restlessness and codependency of Indian women permeates the text: "Native women walk alone from the dances of our youth into homes they don't know for the chance to be away." Her moral crisis emerges as not one of overcoming the shame of her past, but how to live and love while reconciling her need for both connection and independence. Slim, elegiac, and delivered with an economy of meticulous prose, the book calibrates the author's history as an abused child and an a dult constantly at war with the demons of mental illness. An elegant, deeply expressive meditation infused with humanity and grace. Copyright Kirkus 2017 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.