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The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie book cover
2021: Vicki Laveau-Harvie, The Erratics

2021: Vicki Laveau-Harvie, The Erratics

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Description

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.

Judges' Comments

The Erratics is a clear-eyed account of how and where to draw the line with the people we love and survive the aftermath. In this slim memoir, Vicki Laveau-Harvie describes returning from Australia to her childhood home in Alberta to check on her aging parents, who disowned her and her only sister years earlier. She worries that her mother—a long-standing toxic and dangerous presence in her life—is trying to kill her blithely acquiescent father. Despite its troubling subject matter, The Erratics is a darkly humorous and deeply engaging read that leaves an indelible, haunting impression. 

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Explore the works of our previous Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction winners.

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