The Sentence
The Sentence
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Louise Erdrich on The Sentence
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A first line that arrived before the book didThe haunted-bookstore premise had been waiting for years before Erdrich knew what story to put inside it. She owns Birchbark Books, a Minneapolis independent bookstore specializing in Native literature, and the idea of setting a ghost story there felt almost inevitable to her.
I was always going to write a book about a ghost in a bookstore.
The character who would anchor that story came not from plotting but from a single sentence that surfaced on its own. Erdrich had a standing answer whenever anyone asked which one book she would take to a desert island: a dictionary. She gave that answer to a character she had not yet imagined, and the character grew from it.
That just landed in my consciousness. I wrote it down and then thought, Oh, I have to think about this. Why am I writing this? And Tookie’s character emerged.
The book gestured toward something personal even before the plot formed. Erdrich had been carrying ghost stories the way most writers carry unresolved memories, and this novel became the place where her version finally found a home.
Everyone has a ghost story inside of them and I guess this was mine. [paraphrased from audio]
What finally forced the novel into being was not resolution but accumulation. Erdrich had set the manuscript aside for The Night Watchman and returned to it in November 2019, only to watch the world she was writing about transform around her. The pandemic’s invisible, lethal force did not break the frame; it fit it.
It was layers of haunting. The pandemic, I thought, This fits in, because we’re haunted by this invisible force that is lethal that we don’t know how it works; we can’t see it.
How she wrote it
Real time, one fallible woman, no resolutionEvery novel Erdrich had written before this one existed at some remove from the moment of composition. This time there was no distance. She was writing the murder of George Floyd, the protests that followed, and a pandemic as they happened, and she had no precedent for it.
This is the first book I have ever written in real time.
The formal decision that saved the book came from accepting what she could not do. She could not resolve on the page a crisis that was unresolved in the world. So she narrowed the aperture as far as it would go.
It wasn’t an escape. It was the most difficult piece of writing I have ever done.
The prison material grounding Tookie’s, her narrator’s, backstory did not come from research. Erdrich had done actual work with incarcerated people in two states before the novel existed, and that experience gave her something no archive could: the specific weight reading carries when it is nearly the only thing available to you.
I briefly worked with prisoners in North Dakota’s state penitentiary, and then with the Women’s Prison Book Project here in Minnesota. So I knew that reading was one of the few activities afforded inmates, and sometimes the only way to escape the four walls or to connect with what’s going on outside.
She also wrote her way into the atmosphere of the bookstore itself, well enough that the store started to unsettle her. After drafting some of the novel’s scarier scenes, she found herself unable to walk through Birchbark Books after hours without wishing she had brought a flashlight. The setting had turned on its author. The bookstore’s energy, she told the audience at the 92nd Street Y, was never entirely calm.
I’ve gone into the bookstore at night to do some work, and it does feel like that to me. It feels as though I can feel all of this energy. And it’s not all benign. It’s a murmuring energy that’s always around me. [paraphrased from audio]
At the most practical level, her process has always resisted the tidy image of a writer at a desk with a single notebook. The drafts of this novel, like all her others, began by hand and on whatever surface was nearest.
I write first drafts in longhand. I don’t keep one book or journal; I mostly scrawl on various scraps of notebook paper scattered throughout the house.
That method put the sentences of the novel literally among the scraps of a life being lived in Minneapolis during one of its most volatile years, which is precisely where she needed them to be.
The personal thread
The character who showed her a side of herselfGeorge Floyd’s murder in May 2020 came closer to ending the novel than anything else had. Erdrich said she nearly stopped. What kept her going was watching the arguments about policing and protest play out inside her own household, among people with radically different histories, including a formerly incarcerated woman and an ex-cop. She wrote their reactions as true to life as she could manage, without knowing yet whether the book would survive.
Then I thought I would probably quit the book when George Floyd was murdered. I didn’t know how to go forward.
Years after finishing the novel, Erdrich was asked which characters from across her career she missed writing. The answer placed Tookie alongside a character from a completely different book, The Round House, and the reason she gave was not about plot or theme but about what a character can reveal to the person inventing her.
I’m going to answer this as characters I miss writing the most. Those would be 13-year-old Joe in ‘The Round House’ and Tookie in ‘The Sentence.’ Somehow, who they turned out to be the ones that resonated most for me. Sometimes a character reveals a side of yourself you didn’t know about.
On what the book is wrestling with
Ghosts as the history we insist is overThe ghost in the novel, Flora, haunts Tookie and the bookstore in ways that accumulate meaning beyond any single explanation. Erdrich was clear that the haunting was never meant to be a self-contained horror premise. She described what the ghost stands for in terms that reach back well past the events of 2020.
Who doesn’t want to write a ghost story? And it’s not only about a haunted bookstore; it’s about how we are haunted by history and how that alters the present. And the humor is Tookie’s—she has a way with words.
The ghost’s function, as Erdrich explained it to the BookWisdom channel, is to make visible what people have decided to stop seeing. That act of refusal, and the way the refused thing returns, is a pattern she finds everywhere in American history, and particularly in Indigenous history.
what we refuse to see, for what we refuse to hear, for the history that is suppressed, or that we think is over, and then it’s not over. It keeps coming back. [paraphrased from audio]
She collected the title’s meanings the way she collected sentences themselves: one category gave her another until the word carried more weight than any single definition could hold. At the Birchbark Books launch she named them all together: Tookie’s prison sentence, the ghost sentenced to haunt, the grammatical sentence as the unit a writer lives by, and the sentence every person is serving simply by being alive. But the novel’s political tensions she left unresolved by design, because she believes that is what fiction is for.
I think my role as a writer is to reflect the complications of life rather than put them into some sort of orderly business. It’s to reflect how complicated these questions are. It’s good to wrestle with questions.
What she wants us to sit with
The sentence every living person is already servingErdrich began collecting sentences long before the manuscript had a stable shape. At the Birchbark Books launch she described holding two categories simultaneously under one title: beautiful, healing sentences and sentences of legal incarceration. The title word was doing structural work before the novel around it existed.
Everyone has a ghost story inside of them and I guess this was mine. [paraphrased from audio]
The book’s refusal to tidy up the events of 2020 is not a failure of resolution. It is the argument. Erdrich was living through those events inside a household where people held positions that could not be reconciled, and she wrote that irreconcilability into the fiction rather than away from it. What she wants readers to carry out is not an answer but a tolerance for the discomfort of sitting with an unanswered question.
I think my role as a writer is to reflect the complications of life rather than put them into some sort of orderly business. It’s to reflect how complicated these questions are. It’s good to wrestle with questions.
That is the sentence the novel hands to its reader: not a verdict, but a living with.