Love Medicine Characters

Marie Kashpaw (née Lazarre) is the big kahuna matriarch of the Kashpaw family, which is pretty much at the heart of everything in the novel. Here's what you need to know:Almost SaintlyEarly on in...

Nector Kashpaw is the son of Rushes Bear and Kashpaw and the husband of Marie Lazarre. Also, he managed to cause a fair bit of trouble during his time on earth (and even beyond).Nector Was A Studly...

June is the first character we meet in the book, and even though she dies pretty much immediately, her presence looms large over the whole story. It seems she's actually pretty central to the lives...

Lulu is the on-again, off-again object of Nector's desires, and the two of them carry on an affair while he's married to Marie. She doesn't limit her affections to just Nector, though—and through...

In a book that switches between third-person omniscient and first-person limited perspectives across its chapters, Albertine is the first who gets the "first person" treatment. This kind of sets us...

Lipsha Morrissey is June and Gerry's son, although he doesn't really find that out until pretty late in the game. Because he goes through life thinking that his parents abandoned him, he starts out...

King is not in a good place (mentally or otherwise) at any point in the novel. When we first meet him toward the beginning, he gets drunk and beats up on his wife before collapsing in tears on the...

Here's the legend of Zelda: she's Albertine's mother and Marie's daughter. Zelda is a tough customer and seems to find faults galore in others. Probably at least in part because of these qualities,...

Aurelia is Albertine's aunt, Zelda's sister, and Marie/Nector's daughter. Yeah dudes: this family is close and drama-filled.Albertine describes Aurelia as pretty sexy with her "her careful permanen...

King a.k.a. Howard appears in the story as a baby and even gets a chapter devoted to his perspective on his home life, including parents' abusive relationship.Howard is known to be very bright (onc...

Lynette is King's wife and King Junior/Howard's mother. We don't see a whole lot of her, but what we do see is pretty sad, since she and King have an abusive relationship. In our first introduction...

In a family of pretty volatile folks, Uncle Eli seems to be the steady and reliable one. Unlike Nector, he wasn't known for his brains; he seemed a lot more interested in nature than books. Nector...

Although he's named after Lulu's husband, Henry Lamartine Junior is actually Beverly's biological child—Bev and Lulu had a fling the day of Henry's funeral, and Henry Jr. arrived a few months lat...

Elsa is Beverly's wife. We don't learn a ton about her, aside from the fact that Beverly was pretty crazy about her before he ran off to Lulu's. We do get a little bit of a cold vibe with her, perh...

We get to see what happens to Henry Lamartine Jr. after he grows up… and it's not pretty. When we meet him as an adult, he has already been to Vietnam—and he's traumatized as a result. We first...

He is June's on-again, off-again husband. When we first see him through Albertine's eyes, we get a fairly positive picture of the man—or at least, of what he had been up to that point: Uncle Gord...

Lyman is Lulu's son with Nector. He gets his own first-person chapter offering his perspective on his brother's death… but this chapter really tells us more about Henry Jr., and Lyman's attempts...

Gerry Nanapush was Lulu's son with Moses. Apparently, he was a pretty jolly dude, even if he was always in trouble: He laughed at everything, or seemed barely to be keeping amusement in. His eyes w...

When we first meet Dot, we don't necessarily get the best impression. First of all, she's crazy jealous of Albertine for talking to Gerry—to the point of attempting physical violence, even though...

Rushes Bear is Nector's mother and Marie's mother-in-law. She had two husbands: Nanapush (i.e., Lulu's uncle) and Kashpaw. She seems to be a force to be reckoned with—even Marie, who is tough as...

She is a nun at the local mission in the story's present (the 1980s). Gerry ends up trying to confess his "crimes" to her when he goes to the mission after believing he hit June with his car. Accor...

Sister Leopolda is the sadistic nun who tortured Marie when she was a young girl and drove her from the convent (and her aspirations of sainthood). She seemed to actually think she was doing Marie...