May 11, 2020
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.