Where do you see Heart Berries fitting into the wider conversation we’re having about feminism right now? And I understood that, but I also felt like you were able to channel a common experience of women of all races and ethnicities. The Rumpus: So I cheated and read other interviews the question that kept coming up was around your being a voice for indigenous people and especially for native women. I spoke with Mailhot over the phone, and we explored writing as therapy, how she crafts trauma on the page, and how her views on motherhood changed after writing her memoir. The legacy left by her parents lingers long after their deaths, and an even more enduring legacy looms: one of history and womanhood. She grew up on the Sea Bird Island First Nation reservation in British Columbia, surviving a dysfunctional childhood that swung between neglect and tradition, learning and abuse. The work must be striking.”Ī graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts, Mailhot is an English post-doctoral fellow at Purdue University. It is unquestionably akin to a piece of Salish art, which she describes as “sparse and interested in blank space. But Heart Berries is more than just one woman’s account of her breakdown and how she got to the other side. The words she writes there reflect a woman on the very edge of what she can endure. After admitting herself to a mental hospital, she’s diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder and given a journal. In her debut memoir, Heart Berries, New York Times bestselling author Terese Marie Mailhot spares no one, and most especially herself, from her unflinching gaze.

Terese mailhot