Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics is a beautifully crafted, unblinkingly honest, often darkly funny lament for a loving family that never was. The author’s mother was a cruel and abusive narcissist, her father an enabler and Laveau-Harvie and her younger sister the casualties of their parents’ twisted way of inhabiting the world.
Their family home is in Okotoks, a rural area in Alberta, Canada, where an enormous ancient boulder called the Okotoks Erratic “dominates the landscape, roped off and isolated, the danger it presents to anyone palpable and documented on the signs posted around it.” Laveau-Harvie describes Okotoks and the Rocky Mountains that soar above it with wonder and grace. She movingly conveys the ways in which the landscape offered her solace as a child and inspires resolve as an adult. But to survive the trauma of her early years, she first had to leave—moving to France and eventually settling in faraway Australia. “When I could, I took to fleeing ever farther, a moving target working at making herself fainter in the cross hairs, while my sister stood her ground, solid in appearance and stern, modeling her life like play dough. Neither strategy was successful,” she writes.
ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Vicki Laveau-Harvie discusses the long and winding path to publishing her stunning first book.
The Erratics A Memoir Summary
The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie 3,980 ratings, 3.79 average rating, 397 reviews The Erratics Quotes Showing 1-7 of 7 “My sister’s partner leaves the room at some point and strides down the wide hallway to inspect the elevator my mother takes to the lobby every morning to buy her newspapers and flowers. A gripping memoir, Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics mines the psychological damage wrought on a nuclear family by a monstrous personality, set against the bitter cold of a Canadian winter.Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s narrative voice is detached, slightly numb and darkly humorous. She has long abandoned the lonely, shuttered house on the Alberta prairie for the untrammelled emotional freedom of.
In 2006, Laveau-Harvie received a fateful phone call at her home in Sydney: Her elderly mother had broken her hip and was in the hospital, leaving her father alone in her parents' grand mansion. He was also, the author learned, timorous and frail as a result of his wife starving and isolating him. After being estranged from their parents for nearly 20 years, the sisters traveled to Okotoks in an effort to protect their father and procure the appropriate care for their mother.
Their six-year journey of navigating endless health care bureaucracy while revisiting familial pain makes for an engrossing and fascinating read, one that moves with the ebbs and flows of Laveau-Harvie’s supressed, impressionistic memories. She writes, “My past is not merely faded, or camouflaged under the dust of years. It’s not there, and I know a blessing in disguise when I see one.” Through this protective, gauzy “fog” beams the author’s light: an unflinching and empathetic memoir of the collision between past trauma and new outrage, dotted with precious moments of rueful levity and fleeting beauty.
- The Erratics A Memoir (Book): Laveau-Harvie, Vicki: 'In this award-winning memoir, two sisters reckon with the convalescence and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and the care of their psychologically terrorized father, all relayed with dark humour and brutal honesty. When Vicki and her sister learn their mother has been hospitalized for a broken hip, they return to their parents.
- The Erratics: A Memoir Vicki Laveau-Harvie. Knopf, $25.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-525-65861-0. Two adult sisters return to their childhood home in Canada to pick up the pieces of their.
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...a searing, brilliantly-written memoir about a destructive and cunning mother; reads like a novel... --Margaret Atwood via Twitter In this award-winning memoir, two sisters reckon with the decline and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and with the care of their psychologically terrorized father, all relayed with dark humor and brutal honesty.When her elderly mother is hospitalized unexpectedly, Vicki Laveau-Harvie and her sister travel to their parents' ranch home in Alberta, Canada, to help their father. Estranged from their parents for many years, they are horrified by what they discover on their arrival. For years their mother has camouflaged her manic delusions and savage unpredictability, and over the decades she has managed to shut herself and her husband away from the outside world, systematically starving him and making him a virtual prisoner in his own home. Rearranging their lives to be the daughters they were never allowed to be, the sisters focus their efforts on helping their father cope with the unending manipulations of their mother and encounter all the pressures that come with caring for elderly parents. And at every step they have to contend with their mother, whose favorite phrase during their childhood was: I'll get you and you won't even know I'm doing it. Set against the natural world of the Canadian foothills (in winter the cold will kill you, nothing personal), this memoir--at once dark and hopeful--shatters precedents about grief, anger, and family trauma with surprising tenderness and humor.Product Details
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