In dark moments, there is always light, says author who wrote memoir of family trauma

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Originally published on Nov. 3, 2020

A first-time author who won acclaim in her 70s for her memoir of family trauma set against the backdrop of Alberta's Rocky Mountains says she never expected her book to resonate with so many people.

Canadian-born Vicki Laveau-Harvie, who now lives in Australia, won that country's prestigious Stella Prize last year. The literary award celebrating women's writing is worth nearly $50,000.

Her memoir The Erratics has gone on to win praise from readers and critics alike since being published in North America this summer.

It follows Laveau-Harvie as she returns to her hometown in Alberta to help her ailing mother and father after many decades of being estranged with them. Soon, she learns that her mother — who has narcissistic personality disorder — has been starving her father. In trying to help her family, the author learns about the lies her mother has told about her family, and grapples with her traumatic past.

Laveau-Harvie spoke with The Current's Matt Galloway about her book, her upbringing, and the experience of writing her story. Here is part of their conversation.

What does The Erratics mean? I mean, it can be taken a couple of different ways, I suppose.

Well, yes, that's what I loved about it. 

There is a thing down through Alaska, Alberta, into Montana, called the Foothills Erratics Train, and these boulders that are called erratics are kind of scattered every couple of hundred kilometres or so down the path that this glacier took many, many centuries ago. And they're just marooned there in landscapes where they don't belong. 

I thought, what a wonderful metaphor … because erratic was the correct word for my childhood and for a lot of the people that I was dealing with.

You say that you were disowned and disinherited. What do you understand about why that was the case when it comes to your parents?

Well, I think my father just wanted to do whatever it took to be able to live in some semblance of peace with his wife. And I think my mother really did not wish us anywhere near them because my mother never recognized my sister and me as separate people from her when we were children. We were kind of the means to an end. She wanted us to get good marks, she wanted us to do a number of things, but those achievements were really hers. 

She had a personality disorder and it meant her grip on reality was very tenuous. And I think when we grew up, became teenagers and young adults, she realized that we were separate and that she could not control us as she had when we were small, that she really came to feel great disaffection for us.

She did not want us around in any way.

It must have been incredibly hurtful as you're going through all of this stuff.

This is actually a discussion I've had a number of times with people about what happens when you write a memoir. So many people have said to me … "Was it cathartic to write this memoir?" 

I don't believe you can write as well as you would like a book of this nature unless you've already found a path to catharsis somewhere else before.- Vicki Laveau-Harvie

My answer to that is no. It had nothing to do with catharsis. I don't believe you can write as well as you would like a book of this nature unless you've already found a path to catharsis somewhere else before. I think you have to lay your ghosts before you can actually do the work and think about the writerly things: what voice are you going to tell this story in, and how should you tell it, and should you fictionalize [it]. 

Is that what allows you to use humour in telling some of these stories? Because … there's points in the book where it is, you know, put-it-down-because-you're-laughing-so-hard funny.

That's a very nice thing for me to hear, because occasionally I would have to stop writing and laugh a little bit myself. And I think this is what attracted me, was that even in the dark moments, there's always a chink of light. 

As far as the humour goes, I mean, I think it's such a good defence mechanism. You know, it's kind of second nature to me.

Do you think [your mother] loved you?

I don't think that's actually a question I can ask myself. I think she may have. I don't know what kind of feeling she had. I think she may have had affection for me and for my sister as extensions of herself. But I don't think she recognized us for individual people that she could be attached to for who they were. You know, I don't believe that was open to her. I don't think it was malicious on her part. I just think it was something that was perhaps not a possibility for her.

What about for you?

Given what you've gone through … was there still some sort of bond that was there, despite everything that you went through and that you were put through?

I was extremely marked by my childhood, of course. That's why you write a book about it. But I knew that … in a strange way, it was not personal. It was because any child in that situation with her would have frustrated her so severely and disappointed her so severely that they would have had the same treatment I did. It wasn't because I was a failure as a child, it was because she was the person she was, with the handicap that she was carrying. 

And in some ways I felt, towards the end of her life, something close to compassion, because I thought, here I was and here was my sister, and we were trying to take this person's freedom from her. And she was resisting this because we knew she could not live in the real world without coming to great harm herself and without bringing great harm to our father. And I felt what a terrible, terrible thing to be trying to do.

I felt a lot of grief for what she would perhaps have been feeling at that point.

When you speak with readers about the book … what do they say to you about why they feel connected to what you've written?

This is something that flabbergasted me, Matt. I had the great good fortune over a couple of years to meet a lot of people who had read the book. And the first people … who came up to a book signing or an event and said to me, "You've written my story" — I was so surprised. 

To know that what I wrote made someone feel less alone with a difficult problem, that was such a gift- Vicki Laveau-Harvie

I was writing my story, and I hadn't realized until someone or several people had said that actual thing to me — "You have written my story" — I hadn't realized how universal these themes were. And it's ridiculous that I did not realize that because I'm writing about old age, I'm writing about family tensions, I'm writing about mental illness in families, about siblings trying to understand each other, about all sorts of things like this, about finding your way in the world. And everybody goes through these things to some degree.

Again, it's not catharsis, but there is something in terms of dragging memories up when you end up putting them on a page. Knowing that it connects with other people in that way ... does that help in any way?

I wouldn't say that help was necessary at that point. I don't mean to sound arrogant in any way, but ... I'd spent years and years thinking about who was the person I might have been had I not had the childhood that I had. And, ultimately, there's no way to know. But you do try to find your way ... through the difficulties when you're looking back on it, to see what is actually true of you and what [are] inflections that happened because of your circumstances. 

A young man came up to me at one event I did and said ... "I have a similar situation in my family, with a parent." And this was a young man in his 30s, probably. And he said, "I feel much less alone since I've read your book." And I thought, I will treasure that for the rest of my life because I did not set out to do that. I didn't set out to publish a book. That just was a thing that happened. But to know that what I wrote made someone feel less alone with a difficult problem, that was such a gift.

Written by Kirsten Fenn. Produced by Idella Sturino.