Heart Berries: A Memoir
from ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library Hosted by Los Angeles Public Library
The New York Times bestselling memoir Heart Berries is the powerful, poetic meditation of a woman’s coming-of-age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot’s mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. “Here is a wound. Here is need, naked and unapologetic. Here is a mountain woman, towering in words great and small,” writes the bestselling and award-winning author Roxane Gay on Heart Berries. Gay will join Mailhot on the ALOUD stage to discuss the journey of discovering one’s true voice to seize control of your story.
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