Each of the linked stories in the novel explores questions of family’s influence on identity and community. The families of Erdrich’s novel are complicated, each containing different personalities and inspiring both internal and external conflicts. At the center of each of these conflicts is every character’s desire to be claimed, to experience a sense of belonging. This human need manifests in different ways for different characters. For Lipsha and Lyman, their secret or absent parents inhibit their understandings of their selves. For Marie and Lulu, their journey to find alternate homes than the ones they were born into motivates them to become excellent mothers when given the opportunity to create their own families. June Morrissey seeks belonging with fatal consequences, and King’s son Howard rejects belonging to a family formed around violence. The importance of being claimed by someone who loves you, who will give you their name, and will support you, is portrayed as an intrinsic need among all the characters in Love Medicine.

Still, Erdrich resists the idea that families are formed through simple acts of claiming and voluntary participation, or by biological relation. In this novel, families are both constructive and destructive. At times, the family unit is where people in trouble run to for comfort, such as when Henry Junior seeks comfort in Albertine after learning her connection to his family, or when Rushes Bear (Margaret) arrives to care for Marie.