Kathleen Sands further refines critical understanding of the oral form in "Love Medicine" as a competition between personal narratives: no one voice demonstrates a privileged relationship with the truth, and readers can only catch a glimpse of the real story by “puzzling right along with them personal narratives to the end.” Sands writes, “the source of her story telling technique is the secular anecdotal narrative process of community gossip, the storytelling sanction toward proper behavior that works so effectively in Indian communities to identify membership in the group and ensure survival of group values and its valued individuals [… Gossip affirms identity, provides information, and binds the absent to the family and the community.”