I'm Hungry: A Novel

Summary

From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, a novel about the collisions of youth — with want, with art, with tenderness, with fury — as experienced by a young writer in the politically fraught America of the 1970s.

Fargo, North Dakota, 1975. Bazil works whatever jobs she can get and writes whenever she can. Lacking critical judgement and living by a confused romantic credo, she draws others into her life. A wiser, rougher, Chippewa cousin, a seductive gift shop owner, a wealthy New York lawyer passing through town — ecstatic poets and lonely seekers inhabit her world. She is grounded by family as she seeks her own way.

Driven by a hunger for experience, for love, for more life, more poetry, and, always, food, she travels, comes home, becomes entangled in the wild eccentricities of American life. Injustices and resistances boil around her. In the endless fallout of the historical massacre and recent occupation of Wounded Knee, she finds fellowship, grace, and begins to understand her family and her calling.

I'm Hungry explores bitter betrayal, cold-blooded violence, unearthly beauty, and the depths of our voracious appetites, from sexual hunger to the need for a life transfigured by passion and poetry. It asks what a poet is, what a writer is supposed to be, and how a woman can find her voice as she encounters lovers, hustlers, helpers and specters whose hungers threaten to consume her own.

A bold, gorgeously textured, knockabout moral fable, as well as a love letter to downtown Fargo, this compelling novel will find new readers and entrance those who already love Erdrich's work.