Lulu’s had children by what, eight? People sometimes ask me, Did you really have these experiences? I laugh, Are you crazy? I’d be dead. “I’ve only had children with two fathers. She explains that she rewrote the novel completely in 1989, based on her emotional understanding of the characters rather than out of her own experience. So I left everything else and wrote a book called Tracks.” The earliest stories, chronologically, are those about Fleur and Pauline, Nanapush and Eli, which play out between winter 1912 and spring 1924.īut these were not the works Louise Erdrich wrote first. “Then I thought I’d better write a real novel. She finally began to include family tree diagrams after seeing so many devoted fans making their own, bringing them to book readings and signings. So these connections are interconnections, as explained in the the Paris Review interview, from Issue 195 in 2010, with Lisa Halliday. The writing is going to connect where it wants to, and I will have to try and follow along.” “All of the books will be connected somehow-by history and blood and by something I have no control over, which is the writing itself. Readers can choose to read in publication order or in chronological order. This isn’t uncomplicated, and not only because making time for more than a dozen novels when one’s TBR list has 7,559 books on it is tricky.

For years, vaguely since I collected The Bingo Palace with a university course in mind (but there was never enough time to read all the books I planned to read for papers) and intensely since falling in love with The Last Miracle at Little No Horse, I’ve wanted to go back to the beginning of Louise Erdrich’s stories.

Tracks book louise erdrich