Right, I’m into The Erratics – Chapter 18, and loving the Audible version of this text, the textured frailty of Laveau-Harvie’s reading is startling.

There is so much to say. Illuminated by the sweat of the exercise bike and the adrenaline that comes with a workout, I am ready to write realms. I’m thinking of Laveau-Harvie’s extended metaphor – of “doing life as landscape, think of it this way: the black and crevassed surface of the earth near the active Hawaiian volcanos, the lava cooling but still hot and dangerous, just a crust on the top, nothing you would really want to put your weight on..”, and I’m thinking of descriptions of Alberta, the Rockies, of a Canada that Laveau-Harvie has retreated from, only to return to, in order to save a father from a crazed old woman.

Hmm, how to relate the idea of the landscape being life, into an essay? I am thinking about the premise of a memoir where confining ‘forever’ a ‘bitterly unhappy and vindictive old woman, getting crazier and more dangerous by the day’ to an institution, is unapologetically communicated. Avoiding the harshness that threatens to make her writing unpalatable and therefore unsalvageable, Laveau-Harvie speaks the unspeakable. Stripped bare of euphemistic jargon, Laveau-Harvie confronts a reality that is far from esoteric but is the formative experience of many families. Yes, the language is direct, but it’s the honesty that gives Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s writing an achingly poignant (and wickedly funny) tone – totally unselfconscious, she writes as if no one is listening. It is the ‘watershed affair’ of a mother’s leaving ‘in an ambulance on that cold December night, never to return’, and the banality of the episode that makes it so significant. Ordinary, and understated, a mother leaving on a cold December night becomes a turning point in a story where the ‘lava of lunacy’ remains a pervasive threat to ‘a life’.

Can’t wait to read more…..