The Erratics
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
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' home in Alberta to put things back in order. Though their parents disowned them years before, the sisters now reassert themselves in the dysfunctional household: their father, undernourished and suffering from Stockholm syndrome, is unable to see that he is in danger from his outlandish and vindictive wife. 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 must encounter all the characters common in the circus of caretaking--oddball nurses and home helpers; over-opinionated hospital staff who have fallen for their mother's compulsive lies--along with the pressures that come with caring for elderly loved (and sometimes unloved) ones.
Set against the natural world of remotest Alberta ("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 humour.
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.
