By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee (1996) is a satirical novel by Tama Janowitz about the Slivenowiczes, a trailer park trash family who are forced to leave their home in a polluted swamp area in upstate New York (as Maud claims on p. 194 of the hardcover version) and who beg, steal and borrow their way across North America continent until they end up in Hollywood.
The first person narrator of the novel is 19 year old Maud Slivenowicz, whose major source of knowledge is Reader's Digest. Her mother, Evangeline, has five children by five different deadbeat fathers. Without a regular income, the Slivenowicz family dream of becoming movie stars, and at the end of the book it seems one of Maud's brothers might actually be given a role in a t.v. commercial.
The title of the book relates to a famous line in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha.