Unintentional ASMR - Louise Erdrich - "Malone" 1996 Interview - Writer - "Tales Of Burning Love"

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:01]Well, do you believe that there's justice in the world and then and that people get what they deserve? Probably not. And I guess I don't either. I don't think that we all get what we deserve no matter how um how much we'd like to believe that. That's not the stuff of reality and it's really not the stuff of fiction.

[00:00:18]Um if everyone got what they deserved in the end, there wouldn't be a story to the story. I think what happens to him, a lot of it is about emotional freezing.

[00:00:31]What what happens to him is it is is a kind of emotional paralysis. Yeah.

[00:00:36]>> Takes over once he fails that woman in the very first scene when he fails to follow her and she walks to her death and he really he is unable to either experience the depth of his of his reaction or his emotion or to ever uh to recapture the possibility of the moment in which he could have followed her.

[00:01:01]That's the basic story. Yeah, I think.

[00:01:04]I I I don't know how that came about. I I I planned it just to be that central core and to be a real traditional tale where I didn't want to mess around with back and forth in time where these women were going to get in the car, tell their tales and have it over with. It was going to be this big, you know, a small book. But then these end pieces of um tragic um and hilarious funeral scenes and then the other end piece where Jack for instance returns and um um he he visit revisits his wives became gave became weightier than the center of the book. So they they began to gather weight. It's really there's these three parts to it. That's the thing that always astounds me is that uh there's things that occur in my my own life that I I would never think of as fictional possibilities and yet I allow these things into the book.

[00:02:07]Um but it does seem to me that it must arise out of a small town mentality and I grew up in a small town and there seemed to be a continual coincidental repetition of character and person and event and that I didn't think um I didn't think of things that happened as particularly coincidental.

[00:02:30]They just happened to be that way.

[00:02:31]Either that or you've tried to escape in the tug um you know, you finally snap your your your bond. But my characters don't. I mean from the very beginning um June is trying to walk home through that blizzard. And I was saying that Jack Mauser is unable to admit or to embrace that part of his his own ethnic past, his own heritage that June represents. He's also part of Ojibway. Mhm. And he's unable to go home until the end of the book because he can't he can't accept and and and love that part of his own his own character. The thing about it is that I think I mean I'll just speak for myself. I don't think I I can speak for women in general here. I think that women have impulses too that that you know for whatever reason I'm I'm I'm uh I'm I'm a mother. I'm committed to being um to loving and nurturing.

[00:03:35]And yet I understood Jack. Jack really made sense to me somehow. I don't want to be on the receiving end of his crazy mistakes.

[00:03:45]But I understand that impulse and I understand how people really mess up. I still mess up um all the time and I understood how fearful that I was. I guess it's the again the, um, the fact that somehow all seven of us survived. My great fear was something happening to my brother, my sister, something like that, or my parents. And and the feeling that we all got through a crazy, um, though really wonderful adolescence in North Dakota gives me hope. This is more and more, uh, the the the fact of life for people living in a a country such as ours. Don't admire those who suffer. I think I think that's a very profound thing to say, particularly in a a culture in which we tend to love our victimhood perhaps too much and to excuse, um, ourselves continually for whatever we do because such and such happened in our childhood, because such and such was done to us. So, we're we're not therefore responsible for what's inside.

[00:04:54]I think Jack's a perfect example of of this and and and that, um, you know, somebody like Toni Morrison's, um, mother in Beloved takes enormous responsibility upon herself for the death of her child. She did it. She had a reason and it was right and she suffers for it. Perhaps Jack's problem is he doesn't know how to suffer for what he's done.

[00:05:19]And it's unusual that, um, he's a very very sharp critic. But I'm harder on him, in fact. I'm But I I am pretty tough on him, too.

[00:05:31]Sometimes we're talking about an idea. I mean, I Of course, I I trust his judgment, as I said, but I'm also an individual writer and so is he. As a novelist, we both feel that there are times that we need to hold that very close. You know, hold hold a draft, hold an idea, something a dream, something that's working inside that we can't show the other person.

[00:05:58]It's all right to do that. Well, now that our youngest is is in school, so I work school hours. Before that, I don't really know. I don't know. We We You know, um yourself that you go through these You can go through long series of sleep-deprived weeks in which you have your your child is simply um teething or you know, some small thing is happening.

[00:06:22]You just don't sleep. And you sleep in and bursts during the day or you find some other way of making up for it. It's because you know you don't have the time. When When When the When the children were at the age where I didn't have the ability to go after them and keep them happy and keep them safe and do my work, I called a babysitter. I I wasn't going to about to even apologize for that. You know, I always worked with a babysitter after about the first year.

[00:06:51]And that's um that's the only way I survived intact, they survived intact, and you know, we love each other. That's That's how it is. Well, I I think now it's it's one big book. I I don't even know how many are a part of this one book, but I know that it grows by accretion and it grows incrementally and that there's some connection between the characters and the events. What What I'm thinking is that I You know, we were talking about the way books are being published and I think of the publishing process more and more as a kind of expanding file for my books and that I can add chapters and like I I did with the very first book. I found chapters in a I I still write by hand, so there's something to all of this that I think works um I I I I love the that allows me to both write by hand, find pieces and bits of manuscript, type it into computer, and have the computer then is my my giant brain storage place, you know, but I still write everything by hand. And I have handwritten manuscripts of everything. That hasn't happened to me. In fact, um I may be able to do a few more um printouts of the you know, it's easier than retyping the whole manuscript. But I since I in in a way, the only way I converted was to um was to finally put it into the computer because I still have to write as a poet would write and write in each draft draft by hand and then I go through the printout and I write in by hand. And it seems to me that the more intricate my annotations and changes are, the more it belongs to me. So, I have to do that.

[00:08:43]It's very much a hand work to me.

[00:08:47]The reaction is um I in my hometown um the book is a you know, a a library discussion book or um of course, my my family sees the books.

[00:09:00]I had trouble with this one because I didn't want to impose there there's some very frank sexuality in the book. I didn't want to impose it on my father.

[00:09:08]He didn't read between the paper clips and my mother immediately removed them.

[00:09:12]So, it says something about the um I I think women are more at home with sexuality and um and as we get older, we're we're I I'm close in age to my mother. She was very young when when I was born. So, we're able to talk about these things with great deal of ease, but I felt I worried about my father's friends and you know, my father the the people in the town reading it and sure I worry about that.

[00:09:43]In that scene, um this this woman dies and her husband chooses to die with her. And I there's there's a certain frightening intensity to that kind of passion and I I know it um from life as a passion that can exist and it's um it also was uh maybe too literal Tales of Burning Love chapter, but I had to put it in.

[00:10:10]But there's a lot of intensity that I don't find I find it a little a little overwhelming that kind of um till you know, death doesn't part us Mhm. love.

[00:10:24]I felt that finally he was able to um be fully part of her and connected and in a way that was a very macabre um thing for him to do.

[00:10:37]It wouldn't seem so when you think of all the mystical occurrences and the supernatural happenings, but normal people it's not what I set out to do. I didn't set out to either make heroes or villains of any one who is either of my region or of my background or of my I'm a Turtle Mountain Ojibway and uh very proud of that.

[00:11:01]And um the fact is that these these are human characters with passions and fates that don't have to do with um a stereotypical um set of guidelines because that's what my experience has been. I I lived in a human world and I grew up in a world where it was acceptable for um someone of a mixed background to be part of both worlds without a great deal of of psychic pain. I'm you know, it was not difficult for me to identify one way or the other until I left my small town.

[00:11:40]I think it is I I don't think we escape from our our it's genetic or we can call it blood. Um it runs you know, the the genetic destiny that we each have is something that we either fight um strive to change, work with, work out, understand and in the end work work captivated by it. We we only have so much that we can work with. You know, we have our deck of cards. I I I read just about anything and I have um a changing set of writers. Usually I I read poetry um to to really settle in when I'm settling into writing a book. I read um I have right now I I have the Inferno and a spy novel. Simply whatever I can get whatever I grab into my um life, but I love reading historical accounts. Just firsthand type of stuff. I love reading that.

[00:12:44]Um I love in contemporary fiction. I read um I I I like Amy Tan's work very well. I like Toni Morrison. Um I read I read Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor over and over. Um and you're talking about style. I have to say that a lot of what my style evolved from was probably knowing my father who um wrote poetry during boring school teacher meetings and wrote letters to me that would involve long lists of things that he did not want to do to his lawn and very intricate thoughts and he who has memorized Byron and all of Robert Service, and who is a kind of um small-town intellectual with a take a great joy in his intellect. Well, I should have mentioned, too, that it's storytelling that I love and that I think is the the most um satisfying part of a a novelist's day is is is the working out of a story. And my family just tells stories. They tell stories about everything they do.

[00:13:58]Um my father's one, my mother's one.

[00:14:01]It's It's the kind of thing that runs in the family. We're talking about blood and destiny. And I think that's storytelling is part of it. It always was.