Love Medicine

I used to moderate a book club for museum members at what is now the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Love Medicine was chosen by one of our exhibition artists. This astonishing debut is a masterwork about family, poverty, and passion.

The book is set where my grandparents came from, Minnesota and the Dakotas, and illustrates how settlers from Europe (my ancestors) continued to disrupt and destroy Native lives well into the 20th century. Ojibwe spiritual beliefs and Catholicism tangle as tightly as the characters that embody them. Spanning from 1934 to 1985, this novel should not be missed… show more.

This novel carried me into a culture and ways of thinking that of course I myself had never known firsthand.

I found the experience of reading it inspiring. And the vividness of characters, the brilliance of the writer’s perceptiveness about people, the honoring of traditions and family connections, and the liveliness of feeling and thinking and weeping and laughing—all of this was (again, for a fellow writer)—a marvelous achievement of this fiction-writer’s gift.

Fully absorbing, wonderfully informative, and compellingly insightful, this book has remained one of my touchstones as a writer of prose. I love all her work, but this… show more.

My parents were anthropologists who took me as a pre-teen to visit the pueblos of the southwest. There we attended ritual dances, and I was deeply impressed by their devotion, beauty, and power. I incorporated those impressions into the modern dance I was studying and would continue to practice as my first career. Now as a writer I continue my interest in indigenous cultures, and I admire the way the Plains Ojibwe, as portrayed by Erdrich, expand the meaning of “medicine” beyond scientific facts. “Medicine” comes to mean love, the healing force that overcomes envy and anger in communities from… show more.