Heart Berries

Mailhot's memoir is short, but she doesn't let it go down easy. She knows how indigenous memoirs like hers, are taken. "I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle," she writes on the first page; "I didn't know if what I felt was authenticity," she adds later, "or a disease that would overtake me." Blunt and artful at the same time, ruthlessly honest but restlessly uncertain about the truth of her life, she writes as if she's saving her life. Her book reminds me of some of the best ones I've read in recent years, by Vivian Gornick and Yiyun Li: fellow writers who look at the world with a kind of lonely intensity, who never seem satisfied with the words they write even as they hold on to them as if they are all they have.