The Erratics
A Memoir
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
Two sisters reckon with their toxic parents through 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 in this award-winning “brilliantly-written memoir... [that] reads like a novel” (best-selling author Margaret Atwood via Twitter).
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two adult sisters return to their childhood home in Canada to pick up the pieces of their shattered family in Laveau-Harvie's eloquent debut, winner of Australia's 2019 Stella Prize. Home is Okotoks, a prairie town in southern Alberta famous for its "erratic," a massive rock deposited by an ancient ice sheet. Also erratic is Laveau-Harvie's manipulative mother, a pathological liar who disowned both daughters years ago, and their once-robust father, now frail and afraid of his wife. Laveau-Harvie returns to Okotoks from Sydney, Australia, where she lives to help her younger sister assist their father after their mother is hospitalized with a broken hip. Settings echo with elegant menace "The house is paradise in the same way the Hotel California is: a fortress with many bedrooms... a grand piano in the great room... a bomb shelter.... The doors of this house open to no one." So do her mother, "a flesh and blood pyramid scheme, a human Ponzi," and her sister, "rage, a geyser of it... black and viscous, coating everything." Laveau-Harvie maintains an emotional distance throughout, keeps actual horrors (her mother would occasionally starve her father) mostly out of view, and only refers to others by their family role of mother, father, sister, or uncle. With the hinted-at disownment and childhood traumas left untold, her explanation "my past is... a blessing in disguise" leaves the reader wanting more. But that's a minor flaw in an otherwise well-constructed, fluent memoir.
