Michael Dorris’ life was filled with heartache.

The first son he adopted suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and later died in a car accident. His second adopted son allegedly tried to extort money from him. He and his wife of 16 years, novelist and poet Louise Erdrich, were divorcing.

Last week, the award-winning writer committed suicide in a Concord motel at age 52.

At the time of his death, the author of such books as “A Yellow Raft on Blue Water” and “The Broken Cord” was a resident of New Hampshire, where he lived with his wife and their children. But Dorris spent his early years in Washington and Idaho.

“I wasn’t quite born there,” Dorris said during a 1994 interview, “but it was only because my father moved around a lot.” The towns of his youth included Tekoa, Plummer, Dayton, Coeur d’Alene and Tensed.

Dorris’ grandmother, who was born in Coeur d’Alene but later moved to Tacoma, accompanied him when he was awarded a Washington Governor’s Writers Award for “The Broken Cord,” which was published in 1989.

“She was my date,” Dorris said. “She went up to the governor (Booth Gardner) and said, ‘I was a nurse at the hospital when you were born. You gave your mother a terrible time.”’

During his last stop in Spokane, in January when he read from his novel “Cloud Chamber,” Dorris lavished praise on Auntie’s Bookstore and its book-reading series.

“Auntie’s was one of the top-10 book-reading experiences that I’ve had in my life,” he said. “Auntie’s is right up there because it had such a smart, responsive audience. There’s an energy that you get back from a group of people listening, and I’ve carried that memory from reading there.”

Dorris’ comments echoed his fondness for the Inland Northwest in general.

“I don’t want to sound like the chamber of commerce,” he said in 1994, “but I want people to know how fortunate I think they are to live where you live. Although I’m of a lot of places, I take a lot of pride in trying to be of that place.”

Dorris, who was part American Indian, had been on leave as an English professor at Dartmouth College. As an anthropology professor, he founded the college’s Native American Studies department in 1972 and headed it until 1985.

Dorris was best known for “The Broken Cord,” which chronicled his discovery that his oldest son, Reynold Abel, suffered incurable mental handicaps from fetal alcohol syndrome caused by his birth mother’s drinking.

It won him the National Book Critics Circle Award, but success could not stem tragedy.

Abel died after being struck by a car in 1991. Four years later, another adopted son, Jeffrey, was charged with using threats to try to get Dorris and Erdrich to give him $15,000 and publish his manuscript. He was acquitted of one charge and a second was dismissed when jurors deadlocked.

Through it all, Dorris continued to write. Just last month he was working with his publisher to promote his latest book, “Cloud Chamber,” said his editor, Susan Moldow.

Donations can be sent in Dorris’s name to the Seattle Foundation for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

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