Heart Berries is written in simple, declarative language, a style that frees the reader to contemplate the deeper associations between Mailhot’s individual experiences and the experiences of centuries of Indigenous people. This approach challenges the reader to rediscover what defines an epic, as Mailhot undertakes a redefinition of memoiristic language in a search to convey the devastation of intergenerational trauma. Mailhot reimagines the memoir and develops a new form that empties the narrative of exposition as a device to reflect the bareness left behind by trauma. “I’ve memorialized them in a way that is more true to my experience with them, which is even different than what my brothers experienced,” she said in a 2018 interview with Kristin Lin for The On Being Project. Mailhot has referred to Heart Berries as exploring the experience of being Indigenous, a dynamic she has said was made possible by the writers who came before her and did “the work of looking at being Indigenous.” Referring to the clarity with which she relates her childhood abuse and neglect, she has characterized the work as a “memorial” to her parents. Heart Berries contributes to the process of rewriting the myth of Indigenous ancestry, reminding the reader that Indigenous people, like all people, represent the totality of human experience and are not simply spirit guides that “hover around to admonish people about what they should be doing, what they’re doing wrong, how they’re destroying nature,” as the Ojibwe writer David Treuer said in 2006. She writes, “I was the third generation of the things we didn’t talk about,” in a nod to how her early life embodied silences.
Mailhot’s tale stretches much further than the saga of one life, however it spans across many ages as it reckons with intergenerational trauma. Her odyssey is marked by a failed teen marriage, the loss of her eldest child in a custody battle, an undergraduate degree from New Mexico State University, a period in psychiatric care, an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, a second marriage, and a position as a Tecumseh Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University. Mailhot recounts her flight from the grip of abuse, mental illness, and the brutal poverty of life on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. By that definition, what Terese Marie Mailhot encapsulates in the 124 pages of her bestselling memoir Heart Berries is an epic excavation and experiment to uncover and tell the mythology of her lineage. Mythology is the “penultimate truth”-it is what can be known but not directly told, explains Joseph Campbell in the documentary series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.
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