![]() Initially her writing tutor, he is the white male who lurks within the pages simultaneously as a figure of the beloved and a symbol of persecution. The resulting account reads as a series of journal entries, later compiled into short essays and addressed to her second husband, Casey. The telling of this story opens at a point of crisis, when Mailhot, now living in the US, has had herself committed after a breakdown, and is given a notebook in which to record her feelings, her “grand, regal grief”. ![]() Mailhot succeeds in telling the ugly truth with rich and beautiful words, sumptuous imagery and an unforgettable speech She was eventually taken into care at 19 she married (“I wanted a safe home”) and at 20 she had her first child, of whom she lost custody while giving birth to her second. Her mother, for whom the memoir is written as a kind of elegy, was a social worker, poet and healer, often absent, frequently made unwell by household mould and an alcoholic, abusive husband, a man who also victimised Mailhot. ![]() ![]() ![]() I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle.” The story itself begins on the Seabird Island First Nation Indian reservation in British Columbia, where Mailhot grew up in poverty, “overlooking forty acres of corn … only coyotes in the field, and crows, and wild things”. “The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. ![]()
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