VOGUE VOICE

Vicki Laveau-Harvie has been writing her whole life. Now in her mid-70s, the Sydney-based first-time author recently won the 2019 Stella Prize for her debut novel The Erratics, a powerful and darkly funny memoir about her dysfunctional family. Here, she s

Iwas born one winter night in Montreal, Canada. My father was stationed with the Air Force on the Atlantic coast. My mother was alone and frightened in a strange city as she endured the hours before I appeared. Her life had been difficult and would continue to be, but her love of reading never wavered; perhaps she had a book for company. I hope so.

I grew up among books, an early, omnivorous reader. A singular lack of parental oversight meant that I read many books I shouldn’t have.

I understood that I must excel at school, and I was able to. There would have been consequences otherwise, but I was at ease with words, understood my lessons and wrote whatever I was asked.

I wrote a short story for school when I was eight or nine – a tale of duplicity and deceit in a family, cunning and cruelty, punishment, retribution. I frightened myself by writing about those themes. I know now why I chose those things: they were the stones I tripped over on my path. They were the manifestations of my mother’s mental illness, which we lived with every day.

Traumatic childhoods are not utterly black. I got an education; I learned to value truth and clarity, the elegance of a true idea expressed well. I wrote continuously at university and in my various jobs, but began to write fiction and poetry only in my 40s. Perhaps my life was constrained at that point, and I enjoyed the freedom of creating a world the way I wanted it.

I never wrote in a systematic way. I wasn’t aiming for anything beyond the pleasure of finding the idea I didn’t know I had, the insight I hadn’t realised I possessed, and developing it, finding a home for it in the right form: an essay, a poem, a story. I was always, and I remain, in love with the process – the exacting, exhilarating process of putting the idea into the right words – and not the result. It explains why I have been remiss in submitting what I write, in trying to find a public place for it.

When I had finished writing The Erratics, I put it in a drawer for two years. It’s a good idea to put writing in a drawer for a while; when you take it out, you can see where you went wrong, and fix it.

I had written this memoir to tell the story of a six-year period that began when my mother, almost 90, broke her hip and was hospitalised, leaving my father alone, frail and ailing, on a property in the Alberta foothills. My sister and I had been estranged from our parents for two decades, disowned and disinherited as my mother wished.

A person we did not know disbelieved my mother when she said there were no children; this person searched the web and found us,

“I wanted that light and shade – the ludicrous you couldn’t make up, and the rage and pain we all feel at times – that is what life is”

asked us to help. As I write in my memoir, blood calls to blood – for several years, we travelled regularly to this property where my mother had starved and isolated our father until he accepted her twisted version of reality, to help him.

While my mother was recovering from her broken hip, we requested psychiatric assessments. She was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and committed to a locked facility, where she could harm neither herself nor others. My father recovered.

I wrote this story because in some ways it is the story of all families. Some stories are more traumatic than others, but the structure of the dramas playing out is often the same: ageing parents; failing health; sibling rivalry; conflicts of duty and interest; love and grief.

I didn’t write to assuage my own grief. I believe that catharsis should take place away from the page, that a writer is freer to write well if he or she has laid the ghosts to rest in another place – while climbing a mountain, fighting for a cause or turning up the turf of the psyche in therapy. I strove not to settle old scores on the page.

People tell me they are surprised by how funny the book is. I wanted that light and that shade – the ludicrous you couldn’t make up, and the rage and pain we all feel at times – because that is what life is.

Receiving the marvellous Stella Prize for The Erratics has amazed and delighted me. It would mean something different to a young writer; but for me it seems a validation of maturity and breadth of vision, two of the consolations of older age. I am not only trying to see a meaningful future for myself, but also looking back, and reflecting.

In many respects, age is an irrelevance. With reasonable health, we live and love as we always have. For me, there is joy: children and grandchildren, friendships, a new connection of affection and respect I didn’t expect, the continuing pleasure of discovering how to make words sing on the page. The generosity of the Stella changes lives and opens up possibilities, regardless of the age of the recipient: research, travel, uninterrupted time to write. It will change mine.

Perhaps by rewarding a woman writer in her 70s, the Stella is saying what one of the organisers of a recent climate protest, a girl still in high school, said. Why demonstrate, she was asked, when perhaps it is already too late. She said: “It is never too late to do what you can.”

Wise words. Words to live by.

Vicki Laveau-Harvie is the author of The Erratics (HarperCollins Australia,

$22.99) and the winner of this year’s Stella Prize.