I would eat an apple tart and get an Americano, and the place was so unpretentious, there were always community college students and happy people playing fantasy games and other young women, probably mothers like me, doing work in there. Other parts were crafted sitting in a Barnes & Noble, where I worked every weekday for a year, a couple of hours a day. Some parts of the book were written during the hardest parts of my life. The first thing I jotted down was, “I feel stuck in something feminine and ancestral in its misery.” I worked my way into something epistolary from there, and when I got out of the hospital, I wrote the last few lines about descending into the earliest memories of my father, which shook me into unraveling deeper into that history. The workers gave me a composition book and a flexible, non-lethal ballpoint pen. I wrote one chapter, “Indian Sick,” mostly in a hospital. Other parts were crafted sitting in a Barnes & Noble. Each part of the book was cultivated differently. I didn’t have a writing routine with most of “Heart Berries.” I’m more organized with my time now, I promise. The result is a raw, honest portrait of Mailhot’s life as she works to understand how her own upbringing contributed to the struggles she sought to overcome. That meant telling her story as an act of recovery, but “where forgiveness was not a route to healing.” Frustrated by reviews that valued indigenous literature by “what it tells readers about being Indian” rather than the “craft” of the works, the writer said she eschewed that “noise and expectations” while writing “Heart Berries.”

Mailhot is hardly a nobody today, but she sought to carve a name for herself in the literary world on her own terms. Growing up, Mailhot drew inspiration from “any poetry could comprehend,” including Emily Dickinson’s “I am nobody who are you?” She memorized and recited the poem, which reads “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you-Nobody-Too?” and laments over the dreariness of being “somebody.” While she didn’t know it at the time, this writing would eventually grow into “Heart Berries,” Mailhot’s collection of essays about growing up on British Columbia’s Seabird Island Reservation, grappling with her own mental health struggles, her heritage and her relationship with her parents. Those are some of the first words that Terese Marie Mailhot jotted down in her journal while undergoing treatment in a mental hospital a few years ago. “I feel stuck in something feminine and ancestral in its misery.”

Our January pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club “Now Read This” is Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir “Heart Berries.” Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter.

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