We’re excited to share that our January Book Club selection is Heart Berries by former Rumpus Saturday Editor Terese Mailhot (Counterpoint, February 2018)!
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir 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 PTSD and Bipolar II; 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.
Roxane Gay, author of, most recently, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, writes:
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… What Mailhot has accomplished in this exquisite book is brilliance both raw and refined.
Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Club by December 20 to join us in reading Heart Berries, culminating in an exclusive online discussion with Terese Mailhot about the book! And, thrill any and all readers on your list with a Rumpus gift subscription—we have 6-month and 12-month subscriptions to our incredible Book Club, and 6-month and 12-month subscriptions to the equally awesome Poetry Book Club! (And if you’re really out to impress a reader in your life, sign ‘em for both clubs here.) All subscriptions come with a PDF you can print out and slip under the tree, so these make a great last-minute gift, too.
