Heart Berries: A Memoir is the debut book from First Nation Canadian writer Terese Marie Mailhot. It follows Mailhot through her troubled childhood, early and tumultuous motherhood, and into her adult struggles with mental health and personal identity. Maillot's memoir covers many topics relevant to the lives of Indigenous women, including Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. It reached 14 on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardback non-fiction, and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. A number of critics have noted, both positively and negatively, the unique style of the piece, yet despite or because of this, it has received a warm reception and overall praise. Overview The first edition opens with a foreword by Spokane-Coeur d'Alene-American novelist Sherman Alexie, offering what one reviewer characterized as "glowing introduction", and praising Mailhot as the "biological child of a broken healer and a lonely artist." The main body proceeds as a series of essays which explore Mailhot's experiences growing up on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia, including her first marriage as a teenager, and the loss of custody of her first child on the same day she gave birth to her second. It offers insight into Mailhot's struggle with her mental health, including PTSD and bipolar disorder. It explores her experience after committing herself to a mental institution following a breakdown. It was there that she began writing Heart Berries, according to an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, "In those spaces of mental health, there weren't any First Nations counsellors and there weren't any people who understand genocide and what it looks like to come from a culture that has thrived in spite of so much." She then turned to her writing as "a way to avoid my workbook and group therapy … but ultimately writing the truth of what I experienced was something kind of shocking". The book explores Mailhot's familial connections with her mother, father, and grandmother, her mother's habit of bringing predatory men into the lives of her family, and her fathers reckless lawlessness, culminating eventually in his own violent death. It also follows her growing relationship with writer Casey Gray, the white man who would become her second husband, and thematically, at once "a figure of the beloved and a symbol of persecution". After reading Heart Berries himself, Grey comments that, "It did kind of open