Mailhot’s letter to a former lover is filled with dime-a-dozen lines such as, “You used me,” and “Do you still love me? I still want you,” and “I was dramatic and unhinged.” However, a letter to a former lover is meant to be messy, and these lines communicate the universality of Mailhot’s experiences despite the specificity of her struggles. While these kinds of observations are appropriate for a book like Vizzini’s geared toward a younger audience, they feel out of place in a work written for older readers.īut other clichés feel appropriate. Mailhot excessively describes drab cafeteria food and, as can be a common trope in memoirs, asks herself, “What am I doing here?” when she encounters other patients who, unlike her, suffer from psychosis. Her description of a psychiatric hospital doesn’t add more description than those in Ned Vizzini’s young adult novel, “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” a quintessential novel describing life within a psychiatric hospital. Mailhot’s writing is filled with many clichés. Her decision to do so feels more unprofessional than it does raw and unfiltered. She doesn’t bother to use transitions, perhaps because she is experimenting with narrative writing as she writes her journal, and is therefore not concerned with committing herself to a specific form. Often in the same paragraph, she will be describing a setting, and then her thoughts will creep in to take over the rest of the paragraph. Similarly jarring is the way Mailhot goes on tangents without shame. In a way that feels random, the narrative switches between very raw, but very thoughtful journal entries and letters, to former lovers, to more polished sections where Mailhot sets the scene as would an author of a novel. She checked herself in after trying to commit suicide on the condition that she be allowed to write in a notebook she brought with her. Mailhot wrote most of it during a short stay at a psychiatric hospital. Her story is unpolished in a way that is sometimes distracting, but ultimately speaks to her honesty. Mailhot, raised on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest, writes with heart-wrenching earnestness about her upbringing, mental illness, poverty, broken romantic relationships, and her experience as a Native woman in a society controlled by white people. This book is an exciting step forward for representation in literature, and the arts in general. The memoir holds a spot on “Most Anticipated Books of 2018” lists in major publications, and for good reason. Terese Marie Mailhot’s “Heart Berries” was awash with praise before it even debuted.
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