PBS NewsHour and the New York Times have selected one of the best-reviewed memoirs of 2018 for their latest book club pick.
Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries is the newest selection for Now Read This, the book club cosponsored by the PBS program and the newspaper.
Mailhot’s memoir tells the story of her life growing up in Canada’s Seabird Island Indian Reservation, her marriage as a teenager and her struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder. A reviewer for Kirkus called the book “an elegant, deeply expressive meditation infused with humanity and grace.”
In a 2018 interview, Mailhot told Electric Literature that she saw her book as “like an incantation.”
“I was able to write the explicit truths of what happened to me,” she said. “I can’t even speak it, but I can write it…There was something about the physical act of writing that made it less visceral. I was less sick when I started purging the truth of what happened to me on the page. I became physically less anemic and I was more able to function in the world.”
Now Read This is currently celebrating its second anniversary—the club was launched in January of 2018 with Jesmyn Ward’sSing, Unburied, Sing as its first selection. Other picks have included Lesley Nneka Arimah’s Kirkus Prize-winning What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, Robert D. Kaplan’s Earning the Rockies, and Luis Alberto Urrea’s The House of Broken Angels.
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas–based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
