![]() ![]() It’s exciting to think that a person might be able to write their way out of seemingly insurmountable personal, cultural and historical trauma. ![]() In the hospital, they told me that my first son would go with his father.” My court date and my delivery date aligned. … The ugly of that truth is that I gave birth to my second son as I was losing my first. “I left my home because welfare was making me choose between my baby’s formula or oatmeal for myself,” she writes, admitting, “The ugly truth is that I lost my son Isadore in court. The book opens with the tone-setting “Indian Condition.” Without apology, arrogance or sentimentality, Mailhot divulges key features of her autobiography, including her teenage marriage and decision to leave her reservation. ![]() Here, in her fragmentary and interconnected narratives of family love and trauma, neglect and healing, mental illness and recovery, Mailhot offers her own quest for autonomy and self-determination in a milieu in which “Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves.” In blunt yet lyrical prose, she depicts struggles and stories - of herself, her mother, her father and her grandmother - that are at once singular and sovereign, yet also representative and collective, portraying the travails and quotidian heroism required to be “a woman wielding narrative now,” particularly in a world where “no one wants to know why Indian women leave or where they go.” ![]()
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