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Summary
Summary
New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Louise Erdrich's moving meditation on the experience of motherhood--the first nonfiction work by one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.
Louise Erdrich's first major work of nonfiction, The Blue Jay's Dance, brilliantly and poignantly examines the joys and frustrations, the compromises and insights, and the difficult struggles and profound emotional satisfactions the acclaimed author experienced in the course of one twelve--month period--from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to her return to writing in the fall. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Erdrich illuminates afresh the large and small events that every parent will recognize and appreciate.
"Pregnancy, birth and caring for an infant inspire Erdrich's reflections on being a woman, a mother and a writer in this affecting memoir of a daughter's first years."--People
Author Notes
Karen Louise Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where both of her parents were employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Erdrich graduated from Dartmouth College in 1976 with an AB degree, and she received a Master of Arts in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1979.
Erdrich published a number of poems and short stories from 1978 to 1982. In 1981 she married author and anthropologist Michael Dorris, and together they published The World's Greatest Fisherman, which won the Nelson Algren Award in 1982. In 1984 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Love Medicine, which is an expansion of a story that she had co-written with Dorris. Love Medicine was also awarded the Virginia McCormick Scully Prize (1984), the Sue Kaufman Prize (1985) and the Los Angeles Times Award for best novel (1985).
In addition to her prose, Erdrich has written several volumes of poetry, a textbook, children's books, and short stories and essays for popular magazines. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for professional excellence, including the National Magazine Fiction Award in 1983 and a first-prize O. Henry Award in 1987. Erdrich has also received the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, the Western Literacy Association Award, the 1999 World Fantasy Award, and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction in 2006. In 2007 she refused to accept an honorary doctorate from the University of North Dakota in protest of its use of the "Fighting Sioux" name and logo.
Erdrich's novel The Round House made the New York Times bestseller list in 2013. Her other New York Times bestsellers include Future Home of the Living God (2017).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Erdrich, who has published poetry and critically acclaimed novels (Love Medicine, The Beet Queen), here describes her experience with giving birth and the joyful year of mothering that follows. The baby whose arrival she chronicles is the youngest of her three daughters but is also a composite of the biological children among the family's six. A keen observer of nature, Erdrich also movingly evokes wild-animal life and the seasonal changes that take place outside the secluded New Hampshire home of Erdrich and her husband, writer Michael Dorris. Although her mystical side is evident in her descriptions of the natural world and in her account of the strong bond she formed with her new baby, she also looks at life with refreshing common sense. She dismisses the ``pseudo spiritual advice'' that refers to intense labor pain as ``discomfort'' and admits to occasionally feeling resentment at her baby's screams. Erdrich lightens her prose with several recipes that she and her husband prepare together, as well as a menu for an all-licorice dinner. An enchanting, lyrical rendering of a ``mother's vision.'' (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Astute, poetic reflections on the powerful mother-daughter relationship from conception through the baby's first year. Developmental researchers have found that when a mother and her infant gaze into each other's eyes, the feelings generated can be so intense that one or the other must turn away for relief. It is about such feelings that novelist Erdrich (The Beet Queen, 1993, etc.) writes in this intimate record of pregnancy and giving birth. ``Love of an infant,'' she says, ``is of a different order'' than love of an adult: It is ``all-absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages...uncomfortably close to self-erasure.'' But like mother and infant, neither writer nor reader can confront those emotions directly for very long. So Erdrich finds both relief and metaphoric power in painting scenes from her life with her husband, five other children, a dog, and many cats on a New Hampshire farm. She describes dreaming over garden catalogs in the long New Hampshire winter nights, trapping and taming feral cats, collecting birds' nests, an ``all-licorice'' meal her husband prepared to satisfy her inexplicable craving, and a blue jay's defiant dance to successfully thwart a hawk's attack. Tied to each tale of rural life is a range of emotions: rage, depression, frustration, pain, sorrow, and nostalgia as well as transcendent joy, ordinary pleasure, pride, satisfaction, and humor. How ``a writer's sympathies, like forced blooms, enlarge in the hothouse of an infant's needs'' is also part of Erdrich's story, as she trudges back and forth each day to her writing shack, accompanied by her nursing infant. For instance, a writer's effort to understand and depict evil becomes easier when the threat of evil coincides with a mother's absolute need to protect her child. Occasionally too self-conscious about the importance of Erdrich's role as Writer, but the bond between mother and infant has rarely been captured so well. ($60,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Booklist Review
Novelist Erdrich's first major work of nonfiction is a captivating account of her attempt to juggle the joys and demands of selfhood, writerhood, and motherhood. She and her husband, the writer Michael Dorris, are one of America's most famous literary couples and the parents of six children. The oldest three are adopted, their youngest three, all daughters, are their birth children. Dorris has written about their struggle with the consequences of one adopted son's affliction with fetal alcohol syndrome in The Broken Cord (1989). Now, in a much rosier book, Erdrich shares her piquant observations about pregnancy, birth, and caring for a newborn. Ever attuned to the natural world around her, Erdrich has used a seasonal structure for her account of a "birth year" and drawn connections between the stages she and her baby experience and the life cycles of the plants and creatures of the New Hampshire woods surrounding their home. Forthright and radiantly alive, Erdrich writes about all the magic and misery of motherhood and the often incompatible but, for her, inextricably connected arts of writing and mothering. By placing her life within the web of nature, she affirms our place in the cosmos; by articulating her innermost thoughts in such pristine and bracing prose, she affirms the glory and uniqueness of human consciousness. (Reviewed Feb 15, 1995)0060171324Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
Ensconced in her farmhouse in rural New Hampshire and the cottage across the road where she writes, embraced by her devoted writer husband, Michael Dorris, and their several children, Erdrich (The Bingo Palace, LJ 1/94) is pregnant with her third daughter. She is attuned to the rhythms of nature, the movements of small animals, and the quickening of the baby inside her; in this journal she records impressionistically the birth and first seasons of her newborn's life. Her even, trusting prose is punctuated by dazzling observations of man, nature, and child: the solace she takes in burying her face into her husband's luxuriant hair while pushing her baby; the ecstatic tossing of trees in the wind, a landscape so different from her native North Dakota; the ``sense of oceanic oneness'' that only breastfeeding brings. Erdrich the writer and mother fuse seamlessly in this lyrical affirmation of generation; containing recipes prepared by Dorris, it is sure to be popular in all libraries.-Amy Boaz, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
