Love, Destruction, and Wounded Hearts in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris

Abstract

Three notable features mark the fiction of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. First, their work, at least until not long before Dorris’s death in 1997, was the product of an intense and unusual professional and personal partnership. As both authors told interviewers, they collaborated extensively; both would “do the research, develop the plot and characters, discuss all aspects of the work, and ultimately agree on every word before it is submitted for publication” (Chavkin and Chavkin, Conversations ix–x). Their shared interest in each other’s writings was so intense and their fictional situations were so vividly real for them that they said they would dream about their plots and discuss their characters as if they were part of their everyday lives. Dorris said that while out at a restaurant, “we imagine what so-and-so would order from the menu, and what so-and-so would choose from this catalog, so that we get to know them in a full way” (Coltelli 27–28). This example illustrates only one manifestation of the intimate overlap Dorris and Erdrich experienced between their professional lives as authors and their personal lives as a married couple. Their method of working together demonstrates the communal function of literature as well as a “conversational process of collaboration” (Brady 307). Moreover, the complicated interaction and interdependence featured in the authors’ lives and work also appear in the lives and situations of their characters.