Memoir at Adelaide Writers Week

Vicky Laveau Harvie won the 2019 Stella Prize for her memoir, The Erratics. The following year I heard her speak at the closing night of Adelaide Writers’ Week.

The Erratics is the story of the author’s return to her native Canada where her mother has been hospitalized with a broken hip. As an inveterate liar, the mother tells the hospital staff that she only has one daughter and that she’s dead. ‘Do I look dead,’ Vicky’s sister cries in frustration when the nurse refuses her access to the room. Another time the mother claims to have had eighteen children, and not a single one of them on hand ‘when you need them’. Her stories are convincing enough to wrap the ‘hired help’ – as she calls the staff – around her little finger. This includes her husband.

On one trip to the hospital, Vicky spots a sign on the road warning of the unsafe conditions in that section of the Rocky Mountains. She seizes upon the area’s name, The Erratics, as metaphor for her upbringing. She feels the name is the perfect gift for a writer.

After her mother’s death in 2013, Vicky discovers that the mother’s affliction is termed ‘extreme narcissism personality disorder’, for which there is no cure. The condition means that the two daughters are but extensions of their mother. The sister became so enraged once that she grabbed the mother’s medical chart and furiously wrote across it: MMA. ‘What’s that?’ Vicky asked. It’s an Australian-ism for ‘Mad as a Meat-Axe’.

As a child Vicky asked her father why they had so much acreage around their house. It was the amount of space, he reckoned, that was needed to contain his wife’s huge personality; one that he prioritised over those of his daughters, despite the fact that his wife had tried to starve him to death incrementally over the years.

Laveau-Harvie’s on-stage delivery in Adelaide is as smooth as the Canadian Rockies are treacherous. In soft tones she tells us that a memoirist must never write for catharsis. You do your therapy first, she insists, and then you write.

The Erratics twists back and forth in time, as anecdotes build to form the whole, hilarious picture of a family – or two daughters at least – in deep distress. It never loses pace, encrusted with the jewel of what one critic calls the author’s ‘tar-black humour’. Vicky’s vivid, self-amused approach to story-telling balances out the seriousness of her subject. Despite her Canadian-French upbringing, I will claim this memoirist as an impressive credit to the Australian genre. To the global genre even.