Don’t be fooled by the title. Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir, published under the romantic, rather forgettable name “Heart Berries,” is a sledgehammer.

In a book slender enough to slide into your back pocket, Mailhot reckons with the wages of intergenerational trauma. She grew up on Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. Members of her family had passed through Canada’s brutal residential school system, which separated indigenous children from their families and cultures, and, in some cases, subjected them to physical and sexual abuse. Mailhot’s grandmother went to one such school. So many children reportedly starved to death there, the nuns ran out of places to bury them; their bones were hidden in the walls of a new boarding school under construction.

These phantoms speak throughout Mailhot’s book — they speak through her. She began working on it when she had herself committed after a breakdown. She wrote her way out of the chaos of her past, asking: “How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time?”

Mailhot’s early life was pocked with poverty, addiction and abuse. Her affectionate but absent mother brought home men who preyed upon her children. Her satanic father, incarcerated after he and four other men abducted a girl, was so terrifying that Mailhot’s maternal grandmother saved up money to hire a hit man to kill him. He survived, but met a violent death soon enough, killed in a brawl over a prostitute or, some say, a cigarette.

Terese Marie MailhotCredit…Isaiah Mailhot

“Heart Berries” has a mixture of vulnerability and rage, sexual yearning and artistic ambition, swagger and self-mockery that recalls Chris Kraus’s “I Love Dick.” Mailhot writes of a friend: “She thinks my husband doesn’t understand how to communicate love, and I think he’s impotent.” Later, of Casey: “I wanted to know what I looked like to you. A sin committed and a prayer answered, you said. You looked like a hamburger fried in a donut. You were hairy and large.”

She is unsparing to everyone, especially herself. She makes some horrifying admissions: “Isaiah cried all night, and I remembered well that I held a hand over his mouth, long enough for me to know I am a horror to my baby.” She describes blinding rages in which she gave her husband a black eye, broke every glass in the house and some of the windows.

In a trice she can shift registers, though, and her candor and keenness of eye translate surprisingly well to tenderness. “I wondered if maybe falling in love looked like a crisis to an observer,” she writes. “I found myself caressing my own face.” In every revelation — of joy or suffering — there is an unmistakable note of triumph. “I was the third generation of the things we didn’t talk about,” she notes; there is exhilaration in shattering this pattern.

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