The Erratics is a memoir by Canadian-born Australian translator and author, Vicki Laveau-Harvie. It is the winner of the Finch Memoir Prize for 2018. In 2007, Vicki Laveau-Harvie and her sister, in response to the news that their mother has broken a hip, arrive in Okotoks, in Alberta’s prairie lands. They come, despite the fact that they have both been disowned, disinherited and have no legal rights where their parents are concerned. Vicki comes all the way from Sydney, Australia.

What they are hoping is that, now, while their mother in is rehab, they have the opportunity to have her mental health properly assessed, and have her placed in a facility. They are both quite convinced this is the only thing that will save their father. Vicki’s last visit, a year previous, had left her very concerned for her father’s welfare. She noted just how malnourished her father was, and felt sure that her mother was trying to advance his progress into the grave by starvation, and by mental and psychological abuse.

Convincing her mother’s medical team, however, is not straightforward: “The problem is that my mother is supernaturally persuasive. She makes anything sound reasonable. On her urging, Mormans have been known to consume alcohol.” Most of the team looking after her hold her daughters in low regard. Vicki and her sister are well aware of their mother’s power, having grown up under it.

While their father never stood up to his wife on their behalves, they now try to ensure his safety, perhaps because “I have a vision of my mother's influence making its way through my father's mind, filling the tiny spaces left by the rounded contours of his brain, solidifying around the synapses until not even his thoughts are his own.” And as Vicki’s uncle tells her, “Your mother cuts a wide swathe of misery where she passes”.

Perhaps for Vicki, it comes down to applying her principle of pre-emptive karma: Instead of living fully, or to excess, she suspects that “on a corner of my soul is a tattoo saying no regrets all in lower case size 12 Old Bookman font, and it means not excess but restraint… It means always try to do the decent thing, the rational thing, the selfless thing, the boring thing, because then you won't have to beat yourself up with guilt until your early stress-induced death... Do nothing you know you will live to regret”

Laveau-Harvie describes a difficult time in her life, and maybe that’s why some rather black humour creeps in: at an awkward dinner with her parents “My mother’s monologue was interrupted by a rap at the door. This is the country and people don’t just happen by at night, but at this point I would have welcomed home invaders.”

Her sister develops secondary angioedema and “is convinced that the weeks spent whipping my parents’ house into shape with her friends, in preparation for the estate sale, exposed her to toxins that are the root of her problem. I’m sure she was exposed to toxins but I think they may have been more psychological than physical, as she busied herself in our mother’s space, dismantling our mother’s life”

Laveau-Harvie’s account brims with honesty and sincerity: there are no saints here. Regardless of the sanity or otherwise of their parents, readers with elderly parents may find that certain aspects of this memoir strike a chord, especially when care is unavoidably distributed unevenly between siblings. The problem of finding trustworthy carers is a perennial dilemma. Some readers may find the lack of quotation marks for speech annoying, which loses this exceptional memoir half a star.
With thanks to Finch Publishing for this uncorrected proof copy to read and review.