Reviews tagging 'Mental illness'

Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot

95 reviews

bisexualbookshelf's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective fast-paced

3.5

Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries is a memoir that resists easy categorization—a fragmented, poetic, and searingly intimate meditation on survival, identity, and the complicated act of telling one’s own story. With prose that feels like both an offering and a demand, Mailhot unravels the layers of pain, memory, and inheritance that shape her existence as an Indigenous woman in a world that would rather forget her.

Mailhot documents her struggles with mental illness, her fraught relationships, and the impossible expectations placed upon Indigenous women, particularly in the realm of storytelling. She is not interested in neat narratives or palatable resolutions. Instead, she leans into the tension between personal truth and collective history, resisting the impulse to explain or justify. Her words cut with precision: “Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves.” That forgetting—forced, inherited, and sometimes willed—is at the heart of her story.

The memoir traces Mailhot’s time in an in-patient psychiatric hospital, her diagnosis of PTSD, bipolar disorder, and an eating disorder, and her tumultuous relationship with her white creative writing professor, Casey. The power imbalance in their relationship mirrors the broader structures of colonial violence, as Mailhot is forced to navigate both love and exploitation in a space where she is perpetually undervalued. Her struggles with motherhood, memory, and psychiatric care are deeply entangled, revealing how Western institutions fail Indigenous women, offering treatment without understanding, structure without care.

While Mailhot’s reflections on race, gender, and power are striking, Heart Berries is, at its core, a story of relationship dysfunction—one that often reads as a meditation on longing, self-destruction, and unreciprocated devotion. As someone who does not gravitate toward romance-heavy narratives, I found myself frustrated by how much of the book was consumed by Mailhot’s agony over Casey, rather than the sharper interrogations of colonialism and intergenerational trauma that surface throughout. Additionally, childhood sexual abuse is one of my primary triggers, and the lack of content warnings made certain sections difficult to engage with.

Despite these reservations, Heart Berries is undeniably powerful in its form and execution. Mailhot’s writing is unflinching, lyrical, and immersive, a refusal to be easily understood or consumed. Though the memoir was not for me, its rawness and vulnerability are undeniable, making it an essential read for those seeking a voice that refuses to be silenced.

📖 Read this if you love: raw and poetic memoirs, nonlinear storytelling, and explorations of Indigenous womanhood.

🔑 Key Themes: Reclaiming Narrative and Voice, Intergenerational Trauma, Mental Illness and Survival, Race and Gender in Intimacy, The Limits of Western Healing Frameworks.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Mental illness, Toxic relationship, Forced institutionalization, and Suicide attempt

Moderate: Child abuse, Incest, Pedophilia, and Sexual assault

Minor: Alcoholism, Drug use, Eating disorder, Infidelity, Self harm, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Abortion, and Death of parent

The sexual assault, incest, and pedophilia content warnings are in relation to a description of incestual childhood sexual abuse. This description occurs on page 109.

samtheowl96's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense fast-paced

3.75

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Mental illness, Physical abuse, and Alcohol

mayamcdo's review against another edition

challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Mental illness, and Suicidal thoughts

Moderate: Alcoholism, Eating disorder, and Self harm

Minor: Death of parent

jammmbi's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Deep, reflective, and tough to process but something I’m glad I read. I went on an emotional and reflective journey reading this memoir, and it had me taking a moment to reflect on my own relationships with trauma, with grief, with shame, with pain, and brutal honesty with myself. 

Quotes that stick with me:

“If transgressions were all bad, people wouldn’t do them. Do you consider me a transgression?”

“Feel culpable in my insanity because you are partly to blame.” 

“At thirty-two, I was a child, a victim of something.” 

“The right love is an adhesive.” 

“I am not too ugly for this world.” 

“This story is yours, culprit of my pain. Which one of us is asking for mercy?” 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Alcoholism, Child abuse, Eating disorder, Emotional abuse, Mental illness, Pedophilia, Self harm, Sexual assault, Suicidal thoughts, Grief, Abortion, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Pregnancy, and Abandonment

27chickpeas's review against another edition

tense fast-paced

3.5

A powerful book! It started off really strong with some incredible essays. As the book went on, the essays became a littler harder to read due to their content and structure.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcoholism, Incest, Mental illness, Sexual violence, and Suicide attempt

bookworm91's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

2.75

Well written, truthful, difficult subject matter

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Eating disorder, Incest, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Grief, Death of parent, and Colonisation

megnews1's review against another edition

dark fast-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Mental illness

readingpicnic's review against another edition

5.0

Stellar audiobook performance, and an incredible writing style unlike any I've encountered before. I love unabashedly honest memoirs, especially those that dip into the weird and messy. I think that I judged this book by its cover and expected it to be soft poetry, but it was shocking, flagrant, in-your-face storytelling with a poetic flare that I could not put down. I felt like a kitten being carried around by the scruff of my neck listening to this while my mother cat runs down a treacherous path, enjoying the ride but also being like ahhhhh!

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Eating disorder, Mental illness, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Medical trauma, and Suicide attempt

bear_ridge_tarot's review against another edition

challenging emotional inspiring reflective

4.5

 The memoir of a powerful Indigenous woman’s coming of age in the Pacific Northwest. It is a weaving of grief, trauma, abuse, and the complexities of being Native told in such a way that makes the reader feel it all. I listened to this on audiobook narrated by Rainy Fields and could not have been more enthralled with the flow of the story. The struggles of mental health, combined with post-traumatic stress disorder, lends weight to the book which is already heavy with emotion. 

Rainy Fields narrates this with compassion and passion. The tone was perfection, invoking every emotion with perfection. It made the experience more heartfelt than if I’d only read the novel. The rawness of this stream-of-consciousness type story is a type of perfection that cannot come from something more polished. It tells the story of a miserable life, yes, but one that also includes survival and a unique understanding of the inner landscape that isn’t easy to earn. When you read a memoir, especially one penned by the subject, it tends to be neutral in judgment, or even overly flattering. That is not the case with Heart Berries. It is a cathartic, brutally honest telling of a life lived. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Mental illness, and Suicidal thoughts

Moderate: Domestic abuse, Eating disorder, Self harm, and Alcohol

Minor: Incest and Abortion

hannahbee_97's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

5.0

This was a powerful memoir, not an easy listen, but certainly a worthwhile one. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Domestic abuse, Mental illness, Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, and Grief