A review by bisexualbookshelf
Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

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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