Haley's Reviews > Heart Berries

In the Afterword, Mailhot describes how this work started as fiction (pieces of it were even previously published as fiction) and eventually turned into non-fiction: "I realized I had been using the guise of fiction to show myself the truth, and the process of turning fiction into nonfiction was essentially stripping away everything that didn't actually happen to me, and filling those holes left behind with memory."

Learning this contextualized a lot of the aspects I disliked about this memoir - I literally wrote in my notes "memoir but so many narrative elements." It felt to me that Mailhot very much conceived of herself and her story within a narrative, and that degree of separation between her actual, true experience and this highly stylized MFA work grated against me. The pseudo-deepness of some of the lines in this memoir (e.g., "You ruined me with touch. It was a different exploitation;" "I wanted to know what I looked like to you. A sin committed and a prayer answered, you said"), a characteristic that bothers me on its face, furthered this separation between me and the author's true experience, her true psyche in these moments. This distance gendered little empathy, creating frustration and confusion surrounding the author's main decisions over the course of the (short) work. ("[Mailhot] can be fatally attracted to a faux lyricism," as Parul Sehgal put it in her review for the Times.)

These elements will bother some readers more than others. I tend to crave interiority and intimacy in both my non-fiction and my fiction, and this book did not lend that kind of honesty or insight. Moreover, "faux lyricism" is an especial writing pet peeve of mine, and these factors combined made this work very frustrating for me particularly as a reader.