Heart Berries

"It’s too ugly to speak this story. It sounds like a beggar. How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time?"

"Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves."

"I left my home because welfare was making me choose between my baby’s formula or oatmeal for myself. The ugly truth is that I lost my son Isadore in court. … The ugly of that truth is that I gave birth to my second son as I was losing my first. My court date and my delivery date aligned. In the hospital, they told me that my first son would go with his father."

"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."

"My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle."

"Sometimes suicidality doesn’t seem dark; it seems fair."

"The book does everything it technically shouldn’t, brushing off the familiar regimen prescribed by MFA programs, and slipping the strictures of commercial publishing. The thrilling part is, it works. Heart Berries is a reminder that, in the right hands, literature can do anything it wants."

"Having always felt deeply impatient and limited by having to express myself in perfect grammar and punctuation (this was pre-apostrophe gate!), I am quietly reveling in the profundity of Mailhot’s deliberate transgression in Heart Berries and its perfect results. I love her suspicion of words. I have always been terrified and in awe of the power of words – but Mailhot does not let them silence her in Heart Berries. She finds the purest way to say what she needs to say."