In Bookslut’s new feature, Fascinating Writers, Lorette C. Luzajic writes about Louise Erdrich:
The Professor’s Wife: The Life and Work of Louise Erdrich
“The beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being devastated by its power,” said Toni Morrison of Louise Erdrich’s first novel, high praise from a writer who would soon win both a Nobel and a Pulitzer prize.
The novel quickly became a bestseller and won a heap of awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the L.A. Times Best Novel of the Year, and the Janet Kaufman Award for Best First Novel. But numerous publishers rejected the stunning, unusual narrative before Erdrich’s husband posed as a literary agent and launched her prolific and revered career as one of America’s foremost voices in literature. The novel came out in 1984, the same year as Jacklight, her first poetry collection.
It’s astonishing that Oprah Winfrey hasn’t book-clubbed Ms. Erdrich, given the magnate’s penchant for women’s survival stories, multicultural writing, and great literature. More than twenty years and nearly as many books later, all highly acclaimed, it’s impossible to imagine a world without the mixed families and topsy-turvy happenings in Erdrich’s deeply original books. Part Chippewa, and part German, the writer’s stories are set in an invented landscape called Red River Valley, a reservation town on border of North Dakota and Minnesota, two states where she was raised. And despite extreme personal trials, including raising adopted children with fetal alcohol syndrome, a son’s death, her husband’s suicide, and allegations from their children of child abuse, Erdrich continues to produce works that attract both mass market and literary readerships.
Turtle Talk 