Excerpt from Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

One year ago, perhaps thinking that my lack of ambition regarding a degree stemmed from confusion about my origins, perhaps thinking who-knows-what, Sera decided to give me a letter that she had received from my biological mom. Honorable Sera, she had not opened it. I did. I read the letter twice and put it back in its envelope. Then I put the envelope in a manila folder. I am a very organized person. I decided to file the letter. Under what? I needed a label. I thought about that for a while. Biological Family? Potts? How about Immense Disappointment? How about FUCK YOU? It was upsetting to be contacted, after all. And there was worse. It was a shock to realize that on the reservation I was even more ordinary than I'd felt myself to be in college. My family had no special powers or connections with healing spirits or sacred animals. We weren't even poor. We were bourgeois. We owned a Superpumper. I was Mary Potts, daughter and granddaughter of Mary Potts, big sister to another Mary Potts, in short, just another of many Mary Potts reaching back to the colonization of this region, many of whom now worked at the Superpumper franchise first stop before the casino.

What was I to do? Until this biological confusion, until my pregnancy, until this great uncertainty that life itself has suddenly become, I've hidden the fact that I even opened the letter. I've told my Songmaker parents that they raised me, I love them, and that is final. I've told them that I want no complications; I want no issues of abandonment and reconciliation; I want no maudlin reunion, no snake tears. But the truth is different. The truth is I am pissed off. Who are the Potts to suddenly decide to be my parents, now, when I don't need them? Worse, who are they to have destroyed the romantic imaginary Native parents I've invented from earliest childhood, the handsome ones with long, both- sided braids, who died in some vague and suitably spiritual Native way— perhaps fasting themselves to death or sundancing to heatstroke or plunging off a cliff for love or being carried off by thunderbirds? Who were the Potts to keep on living their unremarkable lives without me, and to work in a Superpumper?

I wouldn't have had the slightest thing to do with them if it wasn't for my baby. Sweets, you're different! You're new. Things can start over with you, and things need to start over. You deserve more. You deserve two sets of grandparents. Not to mention genetic info, which may affect who you are even beyond whatever is now occurring. There may be hereditary illnesses. Or unexpected talents— one can always hope, though that seems doubtful, given my birth mother's letter. Still, I think you need to enter the web of connections that I never really had.

I embraced Catholicism in my crisis- creating year, at first as a form of rebellion, but also in an effort to get those connections. I wanted an extended family— a whole parish of friends. It was no passing phase and I have integrated both my ethnicity and my intellectual leanings into my faith first by analyzing the canonization of the Lily of the Mohawks, Kateri Tekakwitha, and then by editing, writing, illustrating, publishing, and distributing a magazine of Catholic inquiry called Zeal. I obtain funding for my work through private donations, occasional per capita casino payments, and a small contribution from my church. I've got enough to keep the magazine going until your due date, December 25, which also means that I've got roughly four and a half months to figure out how to give you a coherent family as well as be a mom.

It's not enough time.

Your father might help, but I'm trying to keep our distance.

All the more reason to find you an extra grandfather, maybe an uncle or two, a cousin— functional, I hope.

From the book: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich. Copyright © 2017 by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.