I’m expressing that and the only way I was able to write - plainly. In that moment, I’m expressing what it’s like to exist with postpartum bordering on psychosis. For example, those passages about that brief moment where I hold my hand over my son’s mouth I realize that I was a horror to my children. My voice, depending on where I’m at and how I’m cycling in or out, it’s made it quicker or slower, more poetic or more frantic.

How has mental illness influenced your creative work? Seeing men - Native men especially - come up and talk about the fact that they identify with how I talk about dysfunction, having a broken heart or the things in my life that still haunt me has been really interesting for me because I didn’t expect it. It was the first time I actualized that vulnerability was a gift and it was something that I should appreciate in myself. When I went offstage, men came up to me to tell me that they wish they had that type of vulnerability. I read “Thunder Being Honey Bear.” It’s one of the chapters that deals with sexual violence, and I read the line “nothing is too ugly for this world” and my eyes watered. How are people interacting with the book? For me it has been profound to see people interacting with the text in this way. Every day someone says something nice about how the book touched them, and only now do I really think I must have done something right. When my book came out, I was so full of self-doubt. It could help other people - to know that they can transgress and they can will power into their lives to do better for people and to earn that forgiveness from their children or from themselves, even. I’m able to look at the ugliest parts of myself and not excuse it but look at it wholly and completely so that I never do it again. A lot of that book is about suicidal ideation. There were only two options: I either learn to grapple with the truth of my life, good and bad, or I end my life. That nobody is too broken, nobody is too much. I wanted to retrieve that idea and deal with it and know that it was a lie. A lot of the final ideation is that people think the world would be better if they were gone. If I was able to reveal the ways in which I’ve failed myself and my children, I think it would help other people forgive themselves too. Part of healing is being accountable for what you have done. But I knew that if I wanted to write a book about my life I couldn’t position myself as a person who had always done the right thing. It was really hurtful to write that I had done those things. But “Heart Berries” includes you giving someone a black eye and a moment when your son is crying in his crib and you put your hand over his mouth.

It can be tempting to leave out ugly parts of yourself to seem likable on the page. Writing a memoir gives you control over your own narrative.

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