er·rat·ic
/əˈradik/
adjective
not even or regular in pattern or movement; unpredictable.
"her breathing was erratic"
GEOLOGY
a rock or boulder that differs from the surrounding rock and is believed to have been brought from a distance by glacial action.

Vicki Laveau-Harvie was born in Canada but put continents between herself and her deranged parents in order to safeguard her sanity. For years she has lived and passed as a typical ratepayer in Sydney, Australia. Her sister didn’t get quite as far away. She lives with her partner in British Columbia, the next province over from Alberta. Over many years, Vicki and her sister dutifully, even heroically, kept tabs on the aging parents who had legally disowned and disinherited them.

Laveau-Harvie’s is a crisp, compelling, and sometimes sardonic memoir, leavened by the occasional dose of gallows humour. It opens at the time that their delusional, vindictive 90-something mother breaks her hip and requires hospitalization. The two sisters fly in to stay with their father in their parents’ sprawling, bizarrely opulent ranch home in Okotoks, a small town just south of Calgary. That place, once frequented by the Blackfoot First Nation, is known and named for the massive boulder now crumbling and caving in on itself—an “erratic”, brought there thousands of years ago by glacial ice. The sisters wonder if they might finally rescue their dad, a frail Stockholm syndrome victim, from the captor whose influence has infiltrated his every synapse. They want to seize the opportunity offered by an osteoporotic fracture, have medical professionals assess their “mad as a meat-axe” mother, and finally see her declared incompetent. It’s a tough prospect: hospitals are in the habit of discharging difficult patients back home to the family, and this patient’s delusional displays are performed with such conviction that members of the medical team are convinced—and, in some cases, actually charmed—by her stories.

The author resists the temptations of the misery memoir and spends little time describing what it was like to be raised by such parents. Laveau-Harvie says that her way of coping with the dysfunction (besides moving across the globe) was to forget it. I’m not sure I completely believe her. In any case, we only get scanty dribs and drabs about the girls’ growing-up years. The family was wealthy: their father made millions in the oil industry, enough for his grasping multilingual wife to purchase and hoard antiques, furs, and valuable paintings by the Group of Seven, iconic Canadian visual artists. At some point, when their mother no longer got a charge out of buying mink stoles and coats, she turned to get-rich-quick schemes, sending out cheque after cheque to scam artists on almost every continent, blithely bleeding away her husband’s bank account. There are closets full of shoeboxes packed with cancelled cheques to prove it.

As the book’s title suggests, THE ERRATICS is a surprising, unpredictable memoir, initially focusing on a destructive and unstable mother and switching to a story about the rescue and reclamation of a father. It raises thought-provoking ethical questions about negotiating one’s way with mentally ill and elderly parents, and it exposes the fractures and divergent reactions to dysfunction within a family. It’s a quick read and a worthwhile one.

Many thanks to the publisher and to Net Galley for providing me with an advance reading copy.