jescoqueerbilly 's review for:

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

5.0

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This book took my breath away. Exquisite, exacting prose tells a story of one individual life and family plagued by mental illness and trauma that resonated with me and my own experience (down to the father who showers with children) more reverberatingly than any narrative I have ever read. At the same time, bold exploration of the shame of feeling/feeding stereotypes and the strength from which she draws as an indigenous woman lays bare social and political dynamics to which I could never speak. Mailhot’s tale is incisive in its marriage of the universal (pain, suffering, desire, craving) and specific (indigenous mother, feeling like a “crazy” woman while navigating pathologization, experiences of racism, sexism, and institutionalization as an indigenous woman). As a person who has struggled for decades to find my own writing voice, there is no other voice I would love more to write in than Terese Mailhot’s. I will continue working on my own voice because I know how extractive such a statement can sound, but I want to be clear about the depth of my admiration for Mailhot’s voice after reading this one book.