The Erratics A Memoir

Posted By admin  On 02.05.21



The erratics a memoir movie

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. ©2020 Vicki Laveau-Harvie (P)2020 Random House Audio What listeners say about The Erratics. The Erratics: A Memoir Vicki Laveau-Harvie. Knopf, $25.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-525-65861-0. Two adult sisters return to their childhood home in Canada to pick up the pieces of their. The author writes well, especially in metaphors and descriptions of landscapes. But this is a revenge memoir in which she ironically comes off as not unlike her mother - self-absorbed and intense. The sister and her partner are the real heroes of this story. The Erratics A Memoir (Book): Laveau-Harvie, Vicki: '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 humor and brutal honesty. When Vicki and her sister learn their mother has been hospitalized for a broken hip, they return to their parents. The Erratics A Memoir (Book): Laveau-Harvie, Vicki: '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.

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. (Aug.)

The Erratics Memoir

Reviewed on : 04/21/2020
Release date: 06/16/2020
Genre: Nonfiction
Hardcover - 224 pages - 978-0-385-69526-8
FORMATS
Audio book sample courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio

The Erratics A Memoir Movie

The Erratics A Memoir

The Erratics A Memoir By Vicki Laveau-harvie

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