Heart Berries: A Memoir

by Terese Marie Mailhot

I don’t think that I am lonely. I think that I am starved and maybe ravenous for the very thing you withhold from me.

I don’t know if men think about what seduction is. It was reading the work you love, and buying clothes, and making polite conversation with your friends

I drove straight to your house. I was angry. I knew that I wasn’t too much.

My mother didn’t feel like mine as much as I wanted to belong to her—to be inseparable from her.

Making Indian women inhuman is a problem for me. We’ve become too symbolic and never real enough.

I remember that motherhood is mostly bearing shame to dress my children, to feed them, and to spare them the things I wasn’t spared.