HEART BERRIES: A MEMOIR
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for March/April 2018
A New York Times Editor's Choice
A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection
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"A sledgehammer. . . . Her experiments with structure and language . . . are in the service of trying to find new ways to think about the past, trauma, repetition and reconciliation, which might be a way of saying a new model for the memoir." ―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
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"I am quietly reveling in the profundity of Mailhot’s deliberate transgression in Heart Berries and its perfect results. I love her suspicion of words. I have always been terrified and in awe of the power of words – but Mailhot does not let them silence her in Heart Berries. She finds the purest way to say what she needs to say... [T]he writing is so good it’s hard not to temporarily be distracted from the content or narrative by its brilliance...Perhaps, because this author so generously allows us to be her witness, we are somehow able to see ourselves more clearly and become better witnesses to ourselves." ―Emma Watson, Official March/April selection for Our Shared Shelf
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"Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot is an astounding memoir in essays. Here, is a wound. Here is need, naked and unapologetic. Here is a mountain woman, towering in words great and small. She writes of motherhood, loss, absence, want, suffering, love, mental illness, betrayal, and survival. She does this without blinking but to say she is fearless would be to miss the point. These essays are too intimate, too absorbing, too beautifully written, but never ever too much. What Mailhot has accomplished in this exquisite book is brilliance both raw and refined, testament." —Roxane Gay, author of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
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"Mailhot fearlessly addresses intimately personal issues with a scorching honesty derived from psychological pain and true epiphany. . . . Slim, elegiac, and delivered with an economy of meticulous prose, the book calibrates the author's history as an abused child and an adult constantly at war with the demons of mental illness. An elegant, deeply expressive meditation infused with humanity and grace." —Kirkus Reviews
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"There is some word we have not invented yet that means honesty to the hundredth power, that means courage, exponentially extended, that means I will flay myself for my art, for my survival, for my family, to keep breathing, to keep writing, to keep being alive. Inside that opening is beauty beyond all measure, the truth that art was invented to carry, and power enough to light the word. This book is that kind of opening." —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
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“Heart Berries makes me think of a quote I have always loved: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ (Keats). With a keen eye for intense truth and thoroughly-crafted beauty, Mailhot's debut sings like poetry, and stays with you long after you've finished the last page.” –Katherena Vermette, award-winning author of The Break
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Order now from Amazon, Indiebound, or Barnes & Noble.
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