The Erratics

Vicki Laveau-Harvie was born in Canada during the Second World War. Her parents raised her and her sister in southern Alberta, Canada. In college, she studied eighteenth-century French literature, and after college, she worked abroad as a translator and business writer. She made her home in France for a time before settling with her family—including a son and a daughter—in Australia. In 2018, she published The Erratics, her first memoir, which promptly won the 2018 Finch Prize for memoir in Australia and the 2019 Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing.

The events in The Erratics take place in the first decade of the 2000s, although Laveau-Harvie and her sister find themselves so occupied with the care of their parents that outside events leave no trace on the narrative. It is notable, however, that the father worked for oil companies from the late 1940s to the 1980s, a period that coincides with massive growth (and wealth generation) in the industry but also with massive geopolitical consequences like the Iranian Revolution and the 1973 Oil Crisis, during which OPEC countries embargoed Canada, the United States, and other countries for their support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The memoir, published initially in 2018, also participates in a renaissance of conversation about the reality—and consequences—of trauma in people’s lives. After the identification of PTSD in military veterans in the 1980s, the trauma studies community hotly debated the ways in which other adverse events could (or did not) affect people in semi-permanent or permanent ways. After a scientific backlash against trauma in the 1990s, scientific and popular opinions began to converge in the mid-2010s on the importance of understanding individual and intergenerational trauma. One example of this shift is the “Me Too” Movement, which brought to light years-old instances of sexual harassment and abuse and validated claims of trauma’s enduring power. Conversations around trauma and its afterlives have continued well into the 2020s as memoirists like Laveau-Harvie delve into their own personal experiences of trauma and as societies reckon with the broader traumas generated by segregation, poverty, and widespread violence.

The Erratics considers a six-year period from shortly before Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s mother’s hip broke and she was removed from her home until her death in her mid-90s, during which Laveau-Harvie and her sister took on a caregiving role for their ageing father and successfully got their mentally unstable mother committed into fulltime care. It thus joins a broad field of memoirs about the trials (and joys) of caring for elder parents, including Sarah Leavitt’s 2012 graphic memoir Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me and Elizabeth Hayes’ 2019 All Things Considered: A Daughter’s Memoir. Laveau-Harvie’s mother, presented as an erratic force of nature, lurks in the corners and memory gaps of The Erratics; other memoirs considering the relationships between adult daughters and their abusive or mentally ill mothers include Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995), Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, and Alison Bechdel’s 2012 Are You My Mother?