Terese Marie Mailhot is from Seabird Island Band. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries: A Memoir. Her book was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-Language Nonfiction and was selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club PiCCK for March/April 2018. Heart Berries was also listed as an NPR Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York Public Library Best Book of the Year, a Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year, and was one of Harper’s Bazaar‘s Best Books of 2018. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, the Electra Quinney Award for Published Stories, a Clara Johnson Award, and she is also the recipient of the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University.
This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Céillie Clark-Keane. Céillie lives in Boston, where she currently works as a managing editor. She has a Master’s in English Literature from Northeastern University, and her work has been published by Ploughshares online, Electric Literature, Bustle, and more.
CCK: What first drew you to writing in general? And what about nonfiction writing specifically?
TMM:My mother was very dedicated to writing, so watching her work on her manuscript every night inspired me to find my own voice and made me feel empowered. She was able to unpack our family history, and she worked on this typewriter—when I hear the sound even now, it brings up a lot of good memories. Nonfiction for me is a wonderful thing because it gives you the ability tocreate a sense of intimacy with your reader immediately. Because the reader knows that it’s true, they depend on you for the truth. Many times I’ve had people ask me if it is harder to write in this genre and also in fragmented form, and I always tell them it is harder. It’s difficult to tell the truth. But the challenge pays off in what it gives the readers. I felt like readers would understand that I was opening myself, and that my vulnerable would empower others, as well.
CCK: Heart Berries is stunning—the precision of the language, the subtle threads, and the larger themes connect these pieces into a cohesive book, but also a cohesive reading experience. Could you speak to your process of choosing to write this book, a memoir, in such a fragmented, lyrical format?
TMM: I wanted to write something that would give a type of memorial to my mother. Her work was lyrical, and she also dealt with the idea that our people are sacred. I wanted to honor my people in the work and also use poetic form.
The other thing is that my memory is shot. I wouldn’t be able to give my story in a chronological, linear form. I would only be able to do my best. Give light to what it’s like to have post-traumatic stress disorder. For me, there are moments in the day where I’m thinking about the loss of my son or thinking about my first marriage, and in the work I convey how everything collides like that. It was going to challenge the reader to jump back and forth with me, but I think a lot of people did that work and I was very appreciative of it.
CCK: I would have to agree as a reader, but I also really like the dual purpose that you just talked about there. The practical reality of memory is such a relatable challenge in nonfiction writing.
TMM: Yes, exactly. Everything in the book I am absolute certainty of. When I was uncertain, I include the explicit statement in the book. When a writer says this, the reader trusts more because they think everyone has a faulty memory to some degree. For instance, the moments and scenes of dialogue between my mother and me, I remember exactly. To write about my father leaving, I called on my family because they remember it much more than I do. The text is informed by others as well, which gives the book a collective feel.
CCK: This book includes so many layered depictions of your family members and your complicated, sometimes abusive relationships with them. What were the challenges in writing about people close to you and people you love? How did you approach writing about them?
TMM: The biggest challenge was articulating myself in those moments while holding myself accountable. It was very difficult to reconcile the things that I had done in my past, but necessary—and being able to do that was ultimately very healing for me. To explain how I lost my son required me to be accountable. I explain how that situation went down and how I was too young to be married. Writing that was very difficult, but in the end it created a more rounded and dynamic viewpoint of how the relationship between me and my first husband. I think it’s really important not to justify your actions on the page because the reader sees right through that.
CCK: I love that advice not to spend time justifying your actions but to focus on being accountable and telling your story for the reader.
TMM: The moment you start explaining things away the reader will notice the untruth.
CCK: I’ve seen your book described as a “coming of age” story. How do you feel about that? Is that how you would categorize it?
TMM: I wouldn’t describe it that way unless I was trying to pitch it, which is a different ballgame. There’s the business of your book and then there’s the art of your book, and any writer has to deal with both. When people read the book, they see that I’m not a child in most of the passages. I’m in my twenties. The book is isolated on a few key moments in my life that deal with abuse and learning to love in the midst and in the shadow of that abuse. Considering that, I can see how it might have been seen as a coming of age. I’ve also seen it described as a manifesto, and I’m certainly not doing that.
The thing is, once you’ve written your book and it’s published, it doesn’t belong to you. You have to do your best to articulate the self and all of its motives within the book itself and then hope for the best. I don’t think it’s bad that my book is described as a coming-of-age tale or a manifesto, because it doesn’t belong to me anymore. I’d care if it was called a romance novel, because you know a few words in that it just isn’t a love story.
CCK: How did you decide to structuring the book as it is? What was your process?
TMM: I knew I wanted to have an emotional trajectory where the reader begins where I began in terms of my mental health, at a point when I felt that all was lost and I was obsessed with suicide. I wanted the reader to start there with the full understanding that I knew where I came from and I was empowered by that. In the end, I wanted the reader to see me transcend into realizing that I could become a writer—or that I could graduate from anything—and see a future for myself even with those long shadows of shame behind me. For that to happen, I understood that in the middle of the work would unravel, and I would use longer sentences to structure roving text that feels loosened. Once I determined that structure while on a residency in Vermont, I was able to really finish the book as I had it in my mind. Before that, nothing ever really sunk in and felt good enough.
When I got to that residency, I had a manuscript of all the work I cultivated in my MFA program, fiction and nonfiction, and I thought the book could go in one of two ways. I could compile everything in chronological order to write a book of fiction, or I could translate these works that were largely factual and all based on my experience and write a book of nonfiction. And if that sounds confusing, it’s because it really was confusing. I printed out the entire manuscript to move pieces around and, ultimately, translate the work into nonfiction.
CCK: I love hearing about how different writers do that restructuring and how it’s so often an actual physical. I have to print it out and keep it on a wall cutting pieces and move it that way.
TMM: Exactly. The emotional trajectory had to be the thread moving the work forward, but what the structuring process really looked like was me plastering every truthful part of my thesis to the wall and figuring out how the pieces go together and what passages need to be revised. I printed out my full manuscript, plastered those pieces on my wall in the studio, and read it out loud a few times to figure out what worked and what didn’t.
CCK: Does your writing process differ from fiction and nonfiction?
TMM: Yes, in fiction I can do what I like, but nonfiction calls for a truthful account. In stories from my MFA thesis, I was using a protagonist with a lot more bravado than I have. Her first-person voice sounded a lot different than mine. For nonfiction, I had to expose a lot more, and I had to pick and choose what I could put in scene. Relying on my memory is much more difficult than visualizing things.
CCK: One of the things that I was struck by were some of your chapters directly addressing Casey and then the final chapter directly addressing your mother. How did those sections of direct address differ from the sections that weren’t framed that way?
TMM: Direct address inspires a sense of intimacy for the reader that works really well. There’s nothing more intimate than reading a letter addressed to someone else. It was also important to me to give my mother some type of memorial. To do that, it had to be addressed directly to her, because in the final passages she is the only person I’m trying to honor. It felt more genuine to write specifically to her.
CCK: Had you planned on structuring the ending of the book that way? If not, once you got there, how did you know that that was the end of the book?
TMM: From what I’ve gathered, finished is a feeling. I’ve talked to a lot of writers, and I always ask desperately like how they know when they’re done. Usually, the first response is that the work never feels done. The second one is that the work feels as good as it’s going to be for now. We grow as writers, which is a great thing, so it has to feel finished for now.
There’s something about seeing your life as art and revising it as such that’s so therapeutic. I had to bury my mother in a literary sense, and as I was putting her in the ground and letting her go, I felt like this book had kind of given me some restoration personally, which I wasn’t expecting. That made me feel like I got what I needed from my own work. This was my chance to make peace with my mother and my opportunity to talk about what it’s like to lose custody of a child. I started treating writing about these moments in my life as art, without the objective to say everything I needed to say.
CCK: What do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction?
TMM: Trying to make the art of things that just happen. There’s not much art to how we live. When we get up in the morning, we’re not doing everything with meaning and there’s not a metaphor for us in the moment. Examining your life to make an art is interesting. Thinking back to the songs that really struck us when we were children, considering the emotional meaning of those songs, and then investigating how they were written and composed or the backstory of the artist. In doing that, we find all of these moments not only meaningful, but trailing into story and making our lives art. That process is a challenge, though.
CCK: And what do you find the most rewarding about writing nonfiction
TMM: The most rewarding thing is getting it right. When I share an essay with an audience and have someone come up to say they really liked one line or a single image. They’re really paying attention to those details, and hearing those details that I’ve written from other people’s voices, that’s the most rewarding thing for me.