He survived, but met a violent death soon enough, killed in a brawl over a prostitute or, some say, a cigarette. 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. Her affectionate but absent mother brought home men who preyed upon her children. Mailhot’s early life was pocked with poverty, addiction and abuse. 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?” She began working on it when she had herself committed after a breakdown.
These phantoms speak throughout Mailhot’s book - they speak through her. 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. Mailhot’s grandmother went to one such school. 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. She grew up on Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. In a book slender enough to slide into your back pocket, Mailhot reckons with the wages of intergenerational trauma.
Terese Marie Mailhot’s memoir, published under the romantic, rather forgettable name “Heart Berries,” is a sledgehammer.
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