By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Colum McCann, George Saunders, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.

There’s nothing conventional about Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot’s debut. A little over 100 pages, it’s far short of the 80,000 words most memoirs need to be deemed viable. There’s barely any exposition: Major characters enter the narrative intimately and without fanfare, almost as though we know them already. A crucial scene might be just three lines of unsparing poetry. In short, the book does everything it technically shouldn’t, brushing off the familiar regimen prescribed by MFA programs, and slipping the strictures of commercial publishing. The thrilling part is, it works. Heart Berries is a reminder that, in the right hands, literature can do anything it wants.

In a conversation for this series, Mailhot discussed a book that gave her the courage to break rules: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, an ode to a mysterious “prince of blue,” written in short, numbered sections, more like a philosophical proof than a traditional love story. In the end, the book afforded both romantic and creative license. As Bluets reminded Mailhot that “you can do anything,” she also found herself falling for the professor who’d assigned it to her—the writer Casey Gray, now her husband. We discussed how love and writing both require adopting a willful blindness to everything we’re “supposed” to do and be.

makes for a slim volume, but it feels as though it weighs a thousand pounds. It turns its gaze