As the novel opens, we’re devolving, though it’s not a straight or linear path backward. That is the central, wonderful premise of Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God. But what if suddenly women were giving birth to babies that emerged as some regressed, earlier form of human? Society as we know it would surely collapse. Meanwhile, for babies, their mothers or caregivers are their entire world, a governing force that controls all aspects of life. It’s a complete shift in worldview, a remaking of identity, a transformation that ripples out from the personal to the social and political. But for others, the birth of a baby is the destruction of one way of life, one way of being, and the start of another. Of course, many start out as tender, maternal people and experience few significant personality changes. There’s something both utterly mundane and completely shocking about bringing another human being into the world, and the process of adjusting to a new life - in both senses of the phrase - is challenging for many mothers, whether they admit it or not. Currently, Erdrich lives in Minnesota where she continues to write and runs the Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore that seeks to create space for Native American authors.PREGNANCY IS APOCALYPTIC, or it can be. Her first novel, Love Medicine, won the National Critics’ Book Circle Award in 1984, and was based on a short story she collaborated to write with her ex-husband, Michael Dorris. There, she wrote many stories that took her indigenous heritage as inspiration. Erdrich wrote short stories and poetry from a young age, and in 1976 became among the first women to graduate from Dartmouth College. She and her mother’s family are members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a recognized tribe of which her maternal grandfather was tribal chairman. The daughter of a Native American mother from the Ojibwe tribe and a German-American father, Louise Erdrich grew up as the oldest of seven children in Little Falls, Minnesota.
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