"...a searing, brilliantly-written memoir about a destructive and cunning mother; reads like a novel..." --Margaret Atwood via Twitter
In this award-winning memoir, two sisters reckon with the decline and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and with the care of their psychologically terrorized father, all relayed with dark humor and brutal honesty.
When her elderly mother is hospitalized unexpectedly, Vicki Laveau-Harvie and her sister travel to their parents' ranch home in Alberta, Canada, to help their father. Estranged from their parents for many years, they are horrified by what they discover on their arrival. For years their mother has camouflaged her manic delusions and savage unpredictability, and over the decades she has managed to shut herself and her husband away from the outside world, systematically starving him and making him a virtual prisoner in his own home.
Rearranging their lives to be the daughters they were never allowed to be, the sisters focus their efforts on helping their father cope with the unending manipulations of their mother and encounter all the pressures that come with caring for elderly parents. And at every step they have to contend with their mother, whose favorite phrase during their childhood was: "I'll get you and you won't even know I'm doing it."
Set against the natural world of the Canadian foothills ("in winter the cold will kill you, nothing personal"), this memoir--at once dark and hopeful--shatters precedents about grief, anger, and family trauma with surprising tenderness and humor.
- ISBN10 0525658610
- ISBN13 9780525658610
- Publish Date 25 August 2020 (first published 21 May 2018)
- Publish Status Remaindered
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Alfred A. Knopf
- Format Hardcover (Deckle Edge)
- Pages 224
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780525658610