A sin committed; a prayer answered

This book is absolutely the real deal. This is incredibly strong and beautifully written memoir. And unlike other recent ones I have read, seems to have fully considered and engaged with the memoir, as a form, is, and what the particularly story and writing should encapsulate. This is thoughtful, painful, pained, and completely realized.

Mailhot, as you would discover reading this, is a First Nations woman from Canada who married when she was sixteen, had a child early, lost that child to custody hearings (while having only recently given birth to a second child) to an ex-husband who seems entirely uninterested in his children. Now, living in the US years later, having become educated in the kinds of formal ways that she feels has been systematically withheld from her, she finds herself in a relationship with a professor and mentor to her writing. The exploitative, but not abusive, founding principles of this relationship is a tangled mass of raw emotions, pain stemming from a colonized body, but also love. And the memoir starts as a letter to this man, explaining what he needs to know and what he needs to understand about her, and more or less faced with the reality that that understanding will not be possible given his privileged state, it shifts to an act of therapeutic writing designed for her to understand and sort through her own pain and trauma.

The structure then is fractured (but more so divided into different pieces) and the various story elements that come through as not a narrative, or not structured as such, and instead are flashes of events that get worked through.

The writing is absolutely beautiful, and given my own position as that of her husband (a white man in his 30s) I too am locked out of any real understanding, but there is still a kind of listening available. I think that’s what the book ultimately is. Permission to listen.

(Photo Credit: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/native-voices-from-welfare-mom-to-author-terese-ma/)