An urgent, provocative new memoir written by a First Nations woman; the narrative style is non-linear, written like a lyrical prose poem, with echoes of the style found in recent works such as Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts Heart Berries pushes the boundaries of form, using storytelling as a way to reveal how memory functions or fragments (as a blend between remembrance, imagination, trauma, and acceptance) With an introduction by Sherman Alexie and confirmed forthcoming endorsements by Maggie Nelson, Roxane Gay, Louise Erdrich, Eula Bliss and Elissa Washuta Submitted for consideration for the ABA Indies Introduce and B&N Discover Great New Writers programs, as well as to the Junior Library Guild New Adult/YA Crossover catalogs For readers who loved Joy Harjo's CRAZY BRAVE and Lidia Yuknavitch's THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER Author has published her essays widely, including in The Toast and The Rumpus, and her essay, I Know I'll Go, was listed as notable in Best American Essays 2016. Praise from Librarians and Booksellers Some books need us more than we need them. Others, the rare ones, are gifts that restore potency to language, confront trauma with wiliness and craft, and revitalize the world. Heart Berries is one these rare books. -Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books (Point Reyes Station, CA) Heart Berries is a slender jewel of a memoir written by a wholly original and unexpected new voice. I have never read anyone like Terese Marie Mailhot-each page delivers new and delightful ways to play with words and sentence structure, in an extremely natural and organic way (nothing overwritten or precious here). It doesn't feel like it was written so much as physically extracted from her body like a root, gnarled and dirty and honest and beautiful. I cried, and laughed, and never wanted it to end. I can't wait to see what she does next. -Leah Cushman, Powell's Books (Portland, OR) Over twenty years have passed since Mary Karr's Liars' Club burst on the scene and delivered an electric shock to the memoir. I'd say that's just about the appropriate amount of time for the dust to have settled enough to create the perfect environment in which Terese Marie Mailhot's debut, Heart Berries, could reawaken the genre once more. I'm not sure mental illness or America's pastime of indigenous exploitation has been tackled with such ferocity and honesty before. Mailhot has a knack for hiding poems within her prose, and each chapter sings with spine-chilling exactness. I found myself rereading almost every passage enough to where I had nearly read the book twice by the time I got to the end. Take my (and Sherman Alexie's) word here: Mailhot is a damn good voice-one to watch for many years to come. -John Gibbs, Green Apple Books on the Park (San Francisco, CA) In a time of memoirs that, at best, help a reader know what vulnerability and facing down fear are, Terese Marie Mailhot's cathartic, moving Heart Berries, is one of the bravest and most fearless of such books. Her coming of age on a First Nation reservation, Seabird Island, in Canada, is particular to that vividly evoked place, but also carries larger universal lessons for the human spirit, its survival, its enduring every kind of trial and difficulty, to find meaning, dignity, and beauty. A necessary book. -Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company This is the boldest kind of writing because it speaks directly to people. Terese Marie Mailhot addresses numerous people she has loved in her life-a mother, a father, a lover, and others-and in doing so, she gets right to the core of it: what it feels like to love, to accept love, despite our and its limitations. Heart Berries is a deep, wrenching, searching sort of book, and it contains impossibly raw, yet seamless, sentences: 'You think weakness is a problem. I want to be torn apart by everything.' It isn't sensational. To call anything in this memoir 'sensational' would be to eschew its logic. Everything in Heart Berries rings true to me. Many upturned stones appeared familiar, felt new. This writing is tactile. Though it deals in questions of love, health, grief, inheritance, and shame, it gave me something to hold. -Will Walton, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA) This book reads like a wildfire. Full of ferocious intellect, searing emotion, and fearless self-examination, Terese Marie Mailhot's memoir surges through the complexity and conflict of love, trauma, identity, and mental illness with language that crackles and burns right off the page. I was blown open reading her honest dispatches of life with her mother, the madness of romantic heartbreak, and her ventures toward love and stability. Brave is an easy word to describe this book, but it isn't enough. Resilient, courageous, powerful, aware, alive, unforgettable; this slender memoir is huge. -Julie Wernersbach, literary director of the Texas Book Festival I have read at least two dozen memoirs this year; Hea
