A review by seeceeread
Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot

dark emotional reflective sad

💭 "Séliš stories are a lot like its art: sparse and interested in blank space; the work must be striking."

This is a torrent. Relentless, stream-of-conscious nonsequiturs circle back to each other. The book is a menacing bath of tales:

assault and need and love and violence and therapy and mothering and child separation and tenderness and despair and and and

. Mailhot seems to want to purge the hurt, to exorcise her uncertainty by naming: she has felt, craved, demanded, retreated. 

I winced to witness, to relive so intimately all that has sliced her.

The author nicks as she tells us of the small ladder she carved into her arm while pregnant.

Like her girlhood self, we are coaxed and cornered into small spaces with the grotesque, wondering if it's safe to speak, to look away. I wanted to hold her at times, a quiet listener as an irregular heartbeat sang of heartache. At others, I wanted to run away, to commit violence against her selfish lover and to snap her into nonchalance. These whiplashes of emotion and intention mirror hers, further evidence she submerged me.

💭 "The tips of your fingers felt like wet grapes. I wanted to bite every one."

Expect to be nipped.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Eating disorder, Infidelity, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Self harm, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Violence, Grief, Suicide attempt, Abandonment, Colonisation, and Classism

Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism, Emotional abuse, Colonisation, and Classism