Terese Marie Mailhot

Terese Marie Mailhot (born 15 June 1983) is a First Nation Canadian writer, journalist, memoirist, and teacher.

Quotes

• I wanted to be at the apex of my story…For a long time, it felt as though things were happening to me. I felt as though I had no agency.
  • On what led her to write Heart Berries in “Why 'Heart Berries' Author Terese Marie Mailhot Doesn't Use The Word ‘Resilient’" in Bustle Magazine (2018 Feb 7)

• Turning those revelations into art was a whole other thing…I did it, though — and that helped me realize my power, beyond the pain. Being able to illustrate those experiences for readers was a triumph, because it took everything to resist all the urges I have as a human being to present myself as good, or healed, or undamaged. I had to work against myself to make the memoir, and I ended up more empowered than I ever thought I could be.
  • On writing about her ordeals in “Why 'Heart Berries' Author Terese Marie Mailhot Doesn't Use The Word ‘Resilient’" in Bustle Magazine (2018 Feb 7)

• Women, not all, but many, like seeing they aren’t alone. My story is very common. I was abused. Mistreated. Hurt by men. I came up. Women resonate with that story because it’s theirs sometimes.
  • On how women might relate to the topics explored in Heart Berries in “Terese Marie Mailhot: On Personal Narratives and Grief” in Room Magazine (2019)

• I think people have to hit rock bottom to really know their faculties because they have to use those faculties to get out of that rock bottom. I really had to feel profoundly lonely to get myself out of the feeling of being profoundly lonely. But it was always there, that feeling of loneliness and existing with the absence of something that had been stripped from me.
  • On being hospitalized for depression in “Terese Mailhot: Truth Is My Aesthetic” in Guernica Magazine (2018 Mar 21)