![]() ![]() ![]() I felt as though I had no agency.” Despite Mailhot’s description of her experiences, she writers her narrator - herself - as the central actor in the memoir, rather than one who is being acted upon. “For a long time, it felt as though things were happening to me. “I wanted to be at the apex of my story,” Mailhot tells Bustle. ![]() While hospitalized, Mailhot is allowed a notebook and it is here that she begins to explore art and illness, what power writing one’s way out of trauma can have. Readers meet Mailhot in the wake of her hospitalization - after growing up in a family rife with dysfunction, grappling with an alcoholic father who molested her - she’s facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder. Above all, perhaps, it is a story about women telling stories - the power of women speaking (or writing) hard truths about their lives. Written in the tradition of authors like Mary Karr and Jeannette Walls, Heart Berries is a poetic, coming-of-age memoir told through essays that explore everything from motherhood and daughterhood, to love and loss, to family and identity, to the intersections of art and mental illness, and more. " - can be found in her debut memoir, Heart Berries, published by Counterpoint Press. That line - "My father died at the Thunderbird Hotel on Flood Hope Road. It took Terese Marie Mailhot four years to finish writing a single line about her father’s death. ![]()
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