Heart Berries

Terese Marie Mailhot, a First Nation Canadian writer, tells of growing up in British Columbia, on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation, in a debut memoir written as a series of essays. After a deeply troubled upbringing she was hospitalized and diagnosed with both PTSD and bipolar II disorder, and there, given a notebook, she began to write. The essays cover her first marriage as a teenager, losing custody of her first child on the day her second was born, her mother, father and grandmother, and the white writer who became her second husband. An afterword takes the form of a question-and-answer exchange with the Inupiaq poet Joan Naviyuk Kane.

Emma Watson picked it for Our Shared Shelf, her book club.