I was not sure I wanted to read this memoir. The story of being raised by a psychotic, violent mother who controlled her husband and legally disinherited her children just seemed to be too dark a story for such a beautiful day. I expected bitterness and anger on the part of Vicki Laveau-Harvie, but instead I got a story that instead was written by a woman who focused on the last few years of her mother’s life. She writes with humor and can look toward the future and seems to have survived quite well. This is a beautifully written story and her ability to craft such a story from a horrid childhood bodes well for more books from this author.

A good memoir is in many ways like an exorcism. After all, something must possess you to write so expungently of more trying times. If you can just get it out, with the page as your confessional and the reader as your priest, then you might come out the other end more whole. But going through this cleansing of memory and madness takes a certain amount of mettle and grit. While it is expressly clear Laveau-Harvie has a rare gift for language, she lacked the courage to use its powers to speak any actual truth. I don't know if I have ever witnessed someone so eloquently or so circuitously skirt an issue, traveling along its edge without ever getting to the center.

If Laveau-Harvie wanted to tell her story, then she would have done better to really tell it, rather than relying on guarded assumptions and cloaked asides which said much without saying anything at all. What I can gather from her grandiloquence is only that her mother was a 'character' at best and a manipulator at worst, yet few examples of her supposed cruelty are ever given. When they are they are quickly shut back up again before anyone can get a decent look. If you do not have the gumption to write a memoir, it is best not to write one at all or perhaps to write it privately, only as a medicine for your own soul and not as a book on a seller's shelf. It is a tragedy of this author's talent for words that she did not use them to compose something more meaningful.

In sum: beautifully written, but disappointing in execution

Verdict: Skip It/Borrow It
2.5/5