Literary Love Scenes

A Second-Hand Writing Tip from Louise Erdrich

Butter. This is what a woman in the audience presses Louise Erdrich about at the James Welch Native Lit Festival in July of 2022. Louise Erdrich is a keynoter on this night when a heat wave shimmers over Missoula, Montana. She has just given a talk from the stage of an old, lavish, renovated theater, wearing dark jeans. During the Q & A, the woman asks the first question (or the first question I remember, as indicated by the jottings in my notebook): how does Erdrich write good love scenes? The butter scene in Erdrich’s novel, Love Medicine, is the sexiest ever, the woman says. This is a surprising question. It gets a laugh. Erdrich takes it in stride. She says the secret is indirectness.

With that exchange in mind, and for this Valentine’s Day post, I’ve just freed my copy of Love Medicine from the bookshelf. I don’t immediately recall my personal history with this book, where I bought it, or why. I rely on the book to slowly reveal our relationship. I open the cover. I have had this copy for a long time. My printed name on the inside is the one I recognize as my young adult rendering. I can make out a faint date in pencil on the inside cover, scribbled there by the bookseller: 10/91. So, I was in college when I bought this book, used, for five dollars. Right, Love Medicine was one of my favorite novels then. I haven’t reread it in decades, and I don’t recall the butter scene. Wait . . . I am lighting a candle and refreshing my memory, pausing in between the lines of this post to let the words of the novel in.

Oh, yes. Lulu and Nector. The heat, the car. This scene would be read as tame by today’s fiction standards of full erotic exposure, but not as unoriginal. The characters are awkward, a bit stiff. One of them is married. Surplus butter meant for distribution to the reservation community where they live becomes a potent solvent. It loosens inhibitions, frees desires, melts flesh into flesh. I wonder what I made of this love scene when I first read it, barely past the age of twenty. Now the thought that comes to mind as I revisit this old flame of a book: not even surplus butter is free.

Further Notes on Louise Erdrich’s Tip from My Medium-Sized Spiral Notebook: People run into trouble when they describe a physical act too overtly – body parts, etc. She uses Colette’s sex scenes as models. Colette (the French writer) describes objects – like a lamp in a room – in such a way that the room is drenched with sex without the characters having to do a thing.

This Valentine’s Day night, why not turn on a lamp and read a book that you had forgotten you loved?

(“READ A BOOK” — Message on a shed in an alley behind our rental during the James Welch Native Lit Festival, Missoula, MT.)