Vicki Laveau-Harvie

A memoir written in a story style. Most engaging. Kirkus: A Canadian-born educator?s account of an unexpected homecoming that forced her to come to terms with a dysfunctional family past.Laveau-Harvie returned to Alberta from Australia after learning that a fall had landed her elderly, "mad as a meat-ax" mother in the hospital. The author?s concern was not so much for her mother, but more for her foggy-brained father, whom her mother had starved and turned against his daughters. Long disinherited by her parents, Laveau-Harvie knew that keeping her mother confined was the only way to save her father. As she began to assess the world her estranged parents inhabited in their filthy, isolated house on 20 acres, memories of her past life with them resurfaced. Most of the memories involved her mother. Though given to sometimes-outrageous exaggeration, she could make "anything sound reasonable. On her urging, Mormons have been known to consume alcohol.? She also seemed to take pleasure in making both her daughters feel like "prey,? often repeating the refrain, "I'll get you and you won't even know I'm doing it.? The author and her sister both fled and made lives far away from home, but when her more conciliatory sister offered to move from her home in Vancouver, her mother suggested that "trespassing anywhere near them would be answered with a Kalashnikov.? For 18 months, the sisters traveled back and forth to ensure that their mother would be ruled incompetent and to see that their father received proper care. The home care specialists they hired¥such as the "housekeeping slut,? the ?gold digger,? and the ?serial killer"Â¥eventually made them realize that they would need to reforge broken ties and bring their father back into their lives. This riveting book explores family relationshipsÂ¥and the sometimes-devastating pain they causeÂ¥with a darkly humorous ferocity that is both remarkable and eloquent.A poignant, unsparing, often poetic memoir.… (más)

Vicki Laveau-Harvie's memoir is a hair-raising account of the poisonous relationship that she and her sister had with their parents, especially their domineering and bizarre mother. After many years of browbeating and maltreating her husband, the mother finally succumbs to a broken hip and winds up in hospital for an extended stay. The sisters see this as their opportunity to extricate their father from her clutches, literally saving his life.

This proves far from straightforward and is made more difficult by Vicki's separation, living in Australia while her family remain in Canada. Her bitter experiences leave her no great desire to come back, and she really just wants this to be over and out of her life.

I thought this was an engaging and at times wry story, but I couldn't help being reminded of Tara Westover's Educated, which shares a similar account of family dysfunction, a sister wanting to escape and even the Northern American climate. I felt Westover's book was better written and packed a heck of a lot more punch, which made me feel this one lacked something in the comparison.… (más)

Daughters Rescue Dad
Review of the Anchor Canada paperback edition (2021) of the Finch Publishing paperback original (2018)

See photo at https://lh4.ggpht.com/-p8iVQuDHcp0/VOMs6wYlHBI/AAAAAAAA_fo/rOtpUgeyosM/okotoks-e...
The Okotoks Erratic "Big Rock" in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada. Photograph sourced from AmusingPlanet.com

Vicki Laveau-Harvie grew up on an isolated ranch near the town of Okotoks, Alberta, Canada about 20 miles south of the provincial capital of Calgary. She now lives in Australia after a career as a translator that took her to France as well. Her sister lives in British Columbia on the west coast of Canada. Both sisters had been disinherited and estranged from their parents for almost 20 years before they took steps to save their father from their delusional mother when the latter shattered her hip and was hospitalized as a result.

The story of this rescue and of some of its background is told in Laveau-Harvie's memoir The Erratics, which uses the analogy of the famous local Okotoks split erratic rock (pictured above) to symbolize the family separation and estrangement and the various torn and split feelings of the daughters' attempts to reconcile with their parents. Laveau-Harvie wrote this originally as a writing exercise but won several awards in Australia as a result, including the Finch Prize to publish it and the Stella Prize for women's writing.

Laveau-Harvie does not go overboard on the story of her mother's delusional excesses, the story is told straightforwardly from her own experience and that which is reported to her by her sister and their partner who were closer at hand during various emergencies. The short of it is that the parents were in their 90's while still living at the ranch home. While wildly spending money on various scams and schemes and luxury purchases, the mother was gradually starving and abusing the father through lack of proper home care. Various literary devices such as flashbacks and flashforwards, foreshadowing and delaying disclosure are used throughout, as well as incorporating the local indigenous legend of the origin of the Okotoks Erratic rock. As Margaret Atwood summarized in her brief Twitter review (linked below) the resulting true-life drama "reads like a novel."

My thanks to Karan for the loan and discovery of this book!

Other Reviews
"A searing, brilliantly-written memoir about a destructive and cunning mother; reads like a novel" from Margaret Atwood on Twitter, March 2, 2020.
Review at Alberta Online, December 1, 2020.
Review at BookPage.com, August 25, 2020.

Related Article
At 77, Alberta expat Vicki Laveau-Harvie has become a literary sensation in her adopted home of Australia in the Calgary Herald, September 12, 2020.… (más)