About Vicki Laveau-Harvie
VICKI LAVEAU-HARVIE was born in Canada and lived for many years in France before settling in Australia. In France, she worked as a translator and a business editor, despite being a specialist in eighteenth-century French literature.
In Sydney, she lectured in French Studies at Macquarie University. After retiring, she taught ethics in a primary school. The Erratics won the 2018 Finch Memoir Prize and was the winner of the 2019 Stella Prize. She has also won prizes for short fiction and poetry. To meet Vicky and her cat visit her Facebook page.
The Erratics: A Memoir
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.
Ancient glaciers did not travel alone. They carried within them pebbles, rocks, even boulders, sometimes for hundreds of miles. These migrating stones, once deposited, are called “erratics” — they stick out among their new surroundings. When the Cordilleran ice sheet worked its way down the mountains of Alaska and across western Canada, it melted to reveal a trail of angular stones now known as the Foothills Erratics Train.
This was the stark terrain of Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s childhood in Alberta. The wayward pebbles and stones provide the title of her memoir — “The Erratics” — and its enigmatic, anchoring metaphor. It is the first book by Laveau-Harvie, 77, and the winner of Australia’s Stella Prize.
Who is the “erratic” of this desolate story of dysfunction, in which the author returns home to care for her aging parents? Is it Laveau-Harvie’s mother, an unpredictable creature of florid narcissism and dangerous persuasion? “She is a kind of flesh-and-blood pyramid scheme, a human Ponzi,” Laveau-Harvie writes. “You buy in and you are hooked. You have an investment in believing the projections, the evangelical 3-D laser image of personal power and aggrandizement, this illusion of depth in thin air.”
Her mother breathed lies. She would invent family members on a lark, and kill them off for sympathy from the neighbors. To get out of a teaching job she no longer wanted, she successfully faked her own death. She manipulated with ease and evident pleasure — and no one quite so efficiently as Laveau-Harvie’s father, who remained besotted with her, chief acolyte to her delusions.
Laveau-Harvie fled home as a young adult, moving first to France, then to Australia to work as a translator and raise a family. (Is she the erratic, given how far she wandered?) The book begins when she learns her mother has shattered her hip, and she and her younger sister return to the “House of Loony,” their fortress of a home on the bleak Canadian prairies. “In winter the cold will kill you,” she writes. “Nothing personal.”
At the hospital, they unwind the web of lies their mother has been spinning to the staff — that she has 18 children, that Laveau-Harvie is wanted by Interpol. In frustration, Laveau-Harvie’s sister takes their mother’s medical chart and writes “MMA” — for “mad as a meat-ax.” The writer worries: “Maybe they’ll see that on the chart and give her some medication called MMA and kill her.” Her sister responds: “Do we care?”
Sorting through the house, they discover their mother has been squandering her savings, sending it to scammers. They find their father disoriented and skinny as a scarecrow — brainwashed, Laveau-Harvie writes, and starved by their mother. The sisters feed and bathe him, console him as he pines piteously for his wife. Keeping the couple separated is imperative, the sisters decide, convinced that their mother will kill him if she returns. They push for their mother to be given a diagnosis of dementia, even as the doctors protest that she is competent.
For such a force of menace, Laveau-Harvie’s mother is a strangely silent antagonist. Once placed in care, she vanishes from the story; the focus shifts to the father — depicted as a helpless, blameless lamb — and the vulnerabilities of old age. The mother is so absent, I began to wonder if Laveau-Harvie still fears her contaminating charm, her ability to distort reality.
In one scene, a conference is held to decide on the mother’s future. In any other book, it might be a pivotal moment — with the main players assembled, the mother primed for attack, her freedom in the balance — but we get a vague sense of events. The writer confesses that she has no memory of what was said. She recalls only the “quaking, liquefying dread” of being near her mother. At the first sight of her mother, in fact, Laveau-Harvie’s sister tries to run: “She wheels around like a horse catching the scent of a bear upwind and I grab her arm. Don’t move, I whisper. It’s OK.”
She can describe her mother’s handwriting, however: “all confident pointed flourishes, a martial-art-weapons script.” And she prowls among her possessions, her fur coats and china. She dips into the past to present a few examples of bizarre behavior — how her mother once crept up behind her and snipped off her ponytail with a pair of scissors — but there is no full accounting of what it was like to grow up with such a woman, no interest in exploring the sources of her cruelty. As a choice it is unsatisfying, but also curiously mesmerizing: the mother as the glacier, the great governing force in their family life, and still too dominant, too vast to be seen whole.
In its compression and odd omissions, its reluctance to diagnose, this memoir is itself an erratic — an outlier in its genre. Think of the vivid portraits of the confounding mothers in Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club,” Alison Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother?” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” Those stories are ledgers of silences, persisting confusions and, at times, outright abuses. They are narratives of the mother-daughter bond that rummage deep in the past and carry into the present, as the writer interrogates what it means to wrest possession of the story. “My mother composed me as I now compose her,” Bechdel writes.
How moth-eaten “The Erratics” appears in comparison — and yet, how intriguing is its approach. Laveau-Harvie’s gaze repeatedly curves away from personality to place — to the setting of her childhood: the ice age that deposited the Foothills Erratics Train, the torn wood inlays and cluttered floors of the dilapidated family home, which she navigates, high-stepping, “like a Lipizzan dancing horse,” wondering, with frantic paranoia, if her mother has arranged an ambush. She cannot travel without noting potential fault lines and grinding tectonic plates, without wondering about the water table or dilating on the black earth near active volcanoes — “the lava cooling but still hot and dangerous, just a crust on the top, nothing you would really want to put your weight on. You could drop through into the molten surge below.”
Laveau-Harvie depicts her mother neither as a riddle to be solved nor as a woman to be understood, but as an implacable act of nature, who must only be survived. If she remains a hazy character in the book, she inflects its every sentence, its structure, its aversions. She was a mother with a monstrous talent for twisting reality. In her memoir of the aftermath, her daughter tethers her story to the very ground beneath her. She speaks only of what she can confirm; she moves carefully, finding her footing.
Many of us spend our entire lives coming to terms with what our parents have wrought (see Philip Larkin). In two very different debut memoirs — Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s “The Erratics” and Gretchen Cherington’s “Poetic License” — the authors, both now grandmothers, also have in common a financially privileged background, and an extremely narcissistic parent.
Laveau-Harvie, the winner of Australia’s prestigious Stella Prize, was raised in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies by a charismatic, floridly psychotic and often violent mother who legally disinherited both her children decades before her death, and manipulated her successful but docile husband to do the same.
After being banished for over 15 years, Vicki and her younger sister return to their childhood home upon learning that their elderly mother is in the hospital, having shattered her hip in a fall. They discover that their mother had not only kept herself and their father isolated in their remote prairie home for years, but she has also systematically starved her husband to the point of severe mental and physical decline. The sisters seize the moment of their mother’s incapacitation to have her mental health evaluated, entering their own assessment of “M.M.A.” into their mother’s chart: “mad as a meat-ax.”
While in rehab, their mother instantly wins over her caretakers, convincing them of the two sisters’ evil intentions. (She tells some people she has no children, that “those girls are just after the money”; she tells others that she had 18 children, all of whom abandoned her; she tells others still that her older daughter fled to Venezuela and is being sought by Interpol.) Watching her in action, Laveau-Harvie muses, “She is a kind of flesh and blood pyramid scheme, a human Ponzi. You buy in and you are hooked.”
Over a period of months, Vicki and her sister are finally able to obtain confirmation of their mother’s legal incompetence, thereby ensuring her permanent hospitalization and saving their elderly father from what would be certain death at his wife’s hands.
As sinister as this sounds, Laveau-Harvie tells the story with laugh-out-loud humor, and tremendous heart and insight. She has a poet’s gift for language, a playwright’s sense of drama and a stand-up comic’s talent for timing. But perhaps most remarkable is the generosity of spirit with which she writes about family trauma.
Focusing on the six-year period at the end of her parents’ lives, Laveau-Harvie barely mentions the nightmare of her childhood, comparing her lost memory to the landscape around active volcanos: “If you pause to look beyond your feet and raise your eyes, you see that in the distance, farthest from the volcano, the surface has hardened. It is black and shiny, making inaccessible most of your childhood, but you can distinguish from early on some signs of the long apprenticeship of duplicity that allows you to be standing where you are now, picking your way cautiously through life, not just a puff of smoke and a carbonized crisp of memory in the depths.”
Unlike her sister, who lives outside Vancouver, Laveau-Harvie has managed to “shake free and flee” Canada to Australia, where she feels “reasonably safe because I do not carry a lot of my past. My sister carries it for me, her foot in the bear trap of our childhood, unable to extricate herself no matter how hard she pulls.”
But despite everything, Laveau-Harvie does not take herself too seriously, and by holding the reins of her story lightly, she gives us the ride of our lives. The book flows with kinetic energy, wit, and wisdom. Upon reaching the last page, I found myself turning to the beginning and starting again, not wanting it to end.
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