2015-08-21
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Louise Erdrich is the oldest of seven children. She was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954. Her mother was French Ojibwe and her father was German American. Louise Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Erdrich's large extended family lived nearby, affecting her writing life from an early age. She came from a family of storytellers.
She attended Dartmouth College and in her junior year she published a poem in Ms. Magazine, and was awarded an American Academy of Poets Prize. Erdrich was awarded a fellowship to be part of John Hopkins University's writing program in 1979. She then worked as an editor of the Boston Indian Council newspaper, The Circle.
Louise had met Michael Dorris when he was teaching in the Native American Studies Department at Dartmouth and years later they reconnected. Then Dorris left for a sabbatical in New Zealand and Erdrich for a writing residency. They corresponded and exchanged manuscripts, and they reunited the following year. Dorris returned to Dartmouth, and Erdrich came back as a writer-in-residence.
They were married in October 1981. During their marriage, Erdrich and Dorris, considered themselves as each other's greatest literary influences. They publicly said that they collaborated on every single piece of writing, every single word. She and Dorris separated in 1995; Dorris committed suicide in March 1997. Erdrich now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her three youngest children.
Erdrich is the author of several novels including Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, Tales of Burning Love, and The Antelope Wife. She collaborated and co-wrote novels with her husband Michael Dorris. She has continued to write novels on her own including The Painted Drum. She writes about her culture over a span of time. Erdrich's narrative technique ultimately accomplishes a holistic temporal view of the Anishinaabe culture in which present occurrences cannot be isolated from the past.
Many critics compare the character of Gerry in Love Medicine, and Nanapush in Tracks to the Trickster, who is by most accounts a people's champion, a joker/healer, a challenger to the gods. Another theme that cultural interpretations focus on is oral tradition.
She owns Birchbark Books, a bookstore in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and continues to write.
I absolutely HIGHLY RECOMMEND this writer's works. Wonderful. Her books are National Bestsellers for good reason.
Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich’s first novel, published in 1984.
Each chapter is narrated by a different character. These narratives are conversational, as if the narrators were telling a story, often from the first-person perspective. There are, however, five chapters that are told from a limited third-person perspective. The narratives follow a loose chronology aside from the first chapter (set in 1981). The conversational tone of the novel is representative of the storytelling tradition in Native American culture. It draws from Ojibwa myths, story-telling technique, and culture. It also incorporates the Euro-Indian experience, especially through the younger generations, some of whom have been forced by government policy to accept, if not possess, Euro-American culture.
Love Medicine begins with June Morrisey freezing to death on her way home to the reservation. Although she dies at the beginning, the figure of June holds the novel together. Similarly, a love triangle among Lulu, Marie, and Nector is a link among the narratives, even though it is not a persistent theme in the novel. There is also a homecoming (or homing) theme in the novel. The use of multiple themes adds to the storytelling effect of the work. Other themes include: tricksters (in the Native American tradition), abandonment, connection to land, searching for identity and self-knowledge, and survival.
