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reatschetter 's review for:
Heart Berries
by Terese Marie Mailhot
Experimental memoir? I was skeptical. But Heart Berries was on multiple lists and so I picked it up. And then I couldn't put it down.
I don't know if I'll ever become a fan of experimental styles of writing, but this worked, and it is in reading the afterword/interview that I understood a little bit more about why it worked. If you are the sort of person (me) who usually skips the author interviews at the end of the book, don't skip this one. I think it is integral to really putting the whole book together.
Heart Berries is alternately confusing and painful. The quote that stood out to me the most was "In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don't even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I'm not sure that their dichotomies apply to me." This, to me, was the essence of Heart Berries; the understanding that there isn't pain/no pain, but rather pain in different forms, pain that is always a part of the journey we take. Life is less about ridding ourselves of the pain than it is finding a way to transcend it, a way, perhaps, to respect it for the complex thing that it is.
I don't know if I'll ever become a fan of experimental styles of writing, but this worked, and it is in reading the afterword/interview that I understood a little bit more about why it worked. If you are the sort of person (me) who usually skips the author interviews at the end of the book, don't skip this one. I think it is integral to really putting the whole book together.
Heart Berries is alternately confusing and painful. The quote that stood out to me the most was "In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don't even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I'm not sure that their dichotomies apply to me." This, to me, was the essence of Heart Berries; the understanding that there isn't pain/no pain, but rather pain in different forms, pain that is always a part of the journey we take. Life is less about ridding ourselves of the pain than it is finding a way to transcend it, a way, perhaps, to respect it for the complex thing that it is.