the National Endowment for the Arts bio page has a huge error - they say she lives in MN with 2nd husband and "their" daughter. there is no 2nd husband. there is/was a baby daddy, about whom she writes in Books and Islands. Tobasonakwut Kinew. Father of grandmotherly baby, Azure she's called mostly but she has at least three names. He's dead. Been dead since 2012, though the NEA seemingly mistakes him for alive and married to her as recently as 2018. there's prolly like 2 people left working at the NEA, so can hardly fault them for a shitty citation back to an obscure interview. I remember thinking "that can't be her hair" of the photo but didn't clock the cancer of 2010 intil after the fact cz she never wrote about it. Until now I wasn't in any kinda fangirl mode, I just reread the novels whenever I felt awfulest for 30 years, tattooing my brain. 

She didn't marry baby dady, either ceremonially or any other way. His obit lists someone else as his wife. In Books and Islands, she clearly respects him, he'a some kind of Native badass. Sun dancer. Outlaw. He also seems like a bit of a prick 🤏, or at least Not Around. The baby stays with her. He doesn't. 

He dies in 2012. No cause of death but a request in the obit for donations to a cancer center in Winnepeg. She gets cancer in 2010, recovers, and in 2012 she publishes The Round House and wins the National Book Award. She also revises The Antelope Wife - like Love Medicine, there are 3 of those, and I am missing the 2012 version (ordered it). 

It is possible that they both get cancer at the same time, but he doesn't get better.

It's also possible that they stopped seeing each other long before that, or not, or something. She never writes about him other than in that one little known travel book. She's palbably single mothery after Dorris, never linked w a steady dude publically. The Round House is a political book, and profoundly pointedly unsexy. Kinew was a politician. 

I am not sure what she did to The Wife in 2012. Does my paragraph survive cancer? 

While I wait for that book to get here, I am reading Kinew's son's biography of his father - we was some kind of big deal, a warrior for traditional cultural restoration. Maybe this son never knew about Erdrich at all or maybe I'll run into her here in a very out of the way book about Manitoba politics.

"Most of what I wrote about was my all-consuming emotions. I was someone who lived at a very high emotional pitch. ​"

You were a drama queen?

"A drama queen is outward. I was inward..."

every day

I am reading interviews, trying to find that thing about nurses. that 👆 is 2024, and she is wearing my clothes. like, I wore that yesterday. the harness boots, the wranglers over n slightly bunching at ankle, the black shirt, the silver earrings that follow the jawline. identical until you get to the hair. weird.

Her breast cancer falls almost exactly at the midpoint of what is explicitly called Erdrich's justice trilogy.

The three novels are:

2008 — The Plague of Doves

Wrongful lynching, historical violence, collective memory, and the persistence of injustice across generations.

2012 — The Round House

Sexual violence against an Indigenous woman, the limits of legal jurisdiction, and the consequences of institutional failure.

2016 — LaRose

Accidental killing, responsibility, restitution, grief, and forms of reparation that exceed the legal system.

Three different legal problems, three increasingly complicated questions about what happens after bodily harm. 

I finished Doves before circling the Antelopes. Doves is a fever dream of relationships impacted over time by violence. It is so nearly impossible to make any straight lines that I stopped trying to draw it out; the point is that despite intentions, what happens between people is often not up to them; they inherit conditions that are insurmountable. Reading it, I noticed, made the heavy rubberband ball in my chest squeeze tighter: I'll never get free of this / this is my last chapter and it will only get worse. 

That 👆 is how I feel when I can separate "me" out at all anymore. 

The 3-novel summary leaves out the fact that my paragraph gets stricken in that same timeframe. The Wife becomes the Woman in 2016. And I remember what Erdrich said in an interview (eliding the illness itself) about nurses, that they went about the business of saving her life without the burden(s) of feeling anything at all. I remember thinking it odd that she of all people would conclude that. And now I find it even more iffy - the first horribly unkind scene is in a hospital in The Round House, the nauseating dread that any kinda ER puts in your gut, the desperocity to be anywhere else. Hardly a 'business' devoid of feelings. Erdrich never writes about having breast cancer, but dread and blood and hopelessness seep into the stories. And, of course, everything is still related to everything.

Today, I will cook and clean and do all the needed things, of course as usual. Perhaps, if Ears is in the mood, we'll work on a jack-o-lantern. Current idea: barfing and half buried in stones = Rock-Bottom-o-Lantern. 

I need to get his mind off the cat, which has gone missing with Sunshine 😪