Not so very long ago, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris were a literary love match of nearly mythic proportions. Married since 1981, they were best-selling and award-winning authors who were raising six children together; they gave interview upon interview describing how they critiqued each other's work, never allowing a single manuscript to leave their home without, as Dorris once put it, "consensus on every word." While some authors vary the dedications in their books, ticking off family and friends as the years go by, for Erdrich and Dorris, it seemed, there was only one Muse--the other. "To Michael, Complice in every word, essential as air," Erdrich wrote at the front of her best-selling The Beet Queen. "For Louise, Companion through every page, through every day. Compeer," read the dedication in Dorris' A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. In 1991 they even collaborated on a novel, Crown of Columbus. That book, too, became a best seller. "They were like a twin star system," says a friend, author Martin Cruz Smith. "I can't think of another pair of writers who work like that." Another good friend, Ruth Coughlin, almost breathless at the memory of seeing the couple on the dance floor, went even further, recalling the pair as "Scott and Zelda without the alcohol."
Yet beneath that high gloss of professional success lay struggle and intense self-doubt; behind their united front lurked dissatisfactions and secrets that eventually unraveled the whole idyllic package. And on April 11, Dorris, 52, was found dead in a Concord, New Hampshire, motel room. He had swallowed a lethal combination of pills and vodka and had tied a plastic bag over his head--a suicide method reminiscent of that used by the Heaven's Gate cultists weeks before. "To whomever finds me, sorry for the inconvenience," his suicide note read in part. "I was desperate. I love my family and my friends and will be peaceful at last."
In short order, the curtains of Dorris' and Erdrich's charmed lives were drawn back. It turned out the couple had separated about a year ago, and were in the middle of difficult divorce proceedings. The three Native American children the couple had adopted had led troubled lives to varying degrees--one had even been charged with trying to extort money from Dorris and Erdrich. And Dorris was living under another cloud: he was being investigated by the Minneapolis police department on charges that he had sexually abused one or more of his young daughters. Just nine days before his death, police had searched his Minneapolis home for evidence.
Did his suicidal impulse come suddenly, or build secretly for years? Late last week Erdrich stepped forward in an attempt to dispel speculation. She told the New York Times that she ended the 15-year marriage in large part because she had grown weary of supporting Dorris through his chronic depression. She had lived with his talk of suicide "from the second year of our marriage," she said. "He descended inch by inch, fighting all the way."