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Summary
Summary
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER. A daughter's tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity.
NAMED A BEST FALL BOOK BY People * Refinery29 * Entertainment Weekly * BuzzFeed * NPR's On Point * Town & Country * Real Simple * New York Post * Palm Beach Post * Toronto Star * Orange Country Register * Bustle * Bookish * BookPage * Kirkus* BBC Culture* Debutiful
On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their lives for years to come: Ben Souther just kissed me.
Adrienne instantly became her mother's confidante and helpmate, blossoming in the sudden light of her attention, and from then on, Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help orchestrate what would become an epic affair with her husband's closest friend. The affair would have calamitous consequences for everyone involved, impacting Adrienne's life in profound ways, driving her into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life--and her mother--on her own terms.
Wild Game is a brilliant, timeless memoir about how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. It's a remarkable story of resilience, a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us.
"Exquisite and harrowing." --New York Times Book Review
"This electrifying, gorgeously written memoir will hold you captive until the last word." --People
Author Notes
ADRIENNE BRODEUR began her career in publishing as the cofounder, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of the National Magazine Award-winning Zoetrope: All-Story. She has worked as a book editor and is currently the executive director of Aspen Words.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This page-turning memoir about an especially fraught mother-daughter relationship from novelist Brodeur (Man Camp) reads like heady beach fiction. At age 14, Brodeur became enmeshed in her mother Malabar's affair with Ben-a married lifelong friend of Brodeur's stepfather Charles-covering for them even after Charles's death. At 21, Brodeur cheated on a boyfriend with Ben's son Jack: "like our parents before us, we spoke in a language rich in innuendo." She later became engaged to Jack, who knew nothing of their parents' affair, and kept quiet about it until Ben confessed to his family and ended the relationship with Malabar. Brodeur and Jack's wedding became "Malabar's battleground. She would be radiant... and show Ben what he was missing"; to that end, Malabar brought out a family heirloom promised to Brodeur on her wedding day-a necklace of allegedly priceless gems-and wore it herself. Wealth and social prominence abound against a summertime Cape Cod backdrop: Malabar was a Boston Globe food columnist, Charles founded the Plimoth Plantation living history museum, and Ben was a proud Mayflower descendant. Nine months after Ben's wife's died, Ben and Malabar married, and Malabar quickly cut off Brodeur, whose own marriage was crumbling: "Now that Malabar finally had Ben... she no longer needed me." This layered narrative of deceit, denial, and disillusionment is a surefire bestseller. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Brodeur's engrossing memoir examines a family defined by one woman's all-consuming magnetism. In 1980, when the author was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her in the middle of the night to tell her that Ben, Brodeur's stepfather's best friend, had kissed her. Brodeur became Malabar's closest confidante, erasing the boundary between parent and child, as that kiss grew into a long-term affair. Brodeur describes the thrill she felt at being her mother's best friend and the guilt of hiding such a major secret from her stepfather and brother. She helped Malabar and Ben shore up alibis and arrange meetings on Cape Cod and in New York City. Wild Game follows Brodeur through adulthood, examining the ripple effects that her relationship with her mother had on Brodeur's own romances. Brodeur changes the names of those involved except for her parents, acknowledging that the story is not hers alone. However, Brodeur includes clearly identifying details about her well-known stepfather, which some readers may find distracting. An absorbing story of secrets, love, and family.--Laura Chanoux Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
There are stories about good mothers and bad mothers, attentive and neglectful mothers: and then there's Adrienne Brodeur's mother, Malabar, who deserves a book all to herself. Adrienne is 14 and on holiday on Cape Cod with Malabar and her stepfather, Charles, when Malabar wakes her in the middle of the night to announce that Charles's closest friend, Ben Souther, has just kissed her. "What do you think I should do?" Malabar asks her teenage daughter, though they both know that this is "a rhetorical question". By the next morning, Malabar has begun an affair with Ben, swearing Rennie, as she calls her, to secrecy. But it gets worse: Malabar co-opts the young girl as an active participant in their liaison for the next 10 years, using her as a cover for her hook-ups with her lover and getting Rennie to lie on her behalf, both to Charles and to Ben's wife. "I became her protector and sentinel," Brodeur remembers, adding with chilling clear-sightedness that from now on the main purpose of her existence would be to "bear witness to my mother's seduction". "This," she adds dryly, "marked the beginning of the rest of my life." It's a life of guilt-wracked deception, in which almost all of Adrienne's energy is spent in the service of her mother's appetites. Malabar is an expert cook who writes a food column for the Boston Globe. To spend more time with Ben, an avid hunter, she comes up with the ruse that they should co-author a wild game cookbook: "My mother and Ben shucked oysters, plucked feathers from mallards, ripped innards out of delicate woodland creatures. Their patter was filled with pornographic double-entendres about the game they roasted, the savoury loins, luscious breasts, tender thighs." By the time she is 16, Adrienne has developed chronic gastric pains: she literally can't stomach her role as her mother's confidante any longer. "I'm sure this is all my fault," Malabar says to the doctor. "As Rennie probably told you, I can be a bit exuberant with the cayenne." But she continues to cannibalise her daughter, joking privately that Rennie is "the best psychiatrist she'd ever had, not to mention the cheapest". As Brodeur leaves for college, Malabar warns her: "Don't ever forget that you and I are two halves of one whole." Wild Game, in other words, is a story of child abuse, though it's marketed (down to the Lolita-ish image of a halter-topped pubescent girl on its cover) as a tale of wayward romance, and the complex "nature of family". Make no mistake: it's infinitely darker than that, though the darkness is tamped down under a polished veneer. The Cordon Bleu recipes and the cocktail rituals of Malabar's moneyed East Coast set belie a world marked by casual violence and grotesque consumption - of food, of alcohol and of people. Her affair with Ben starts just after he makes her a present of a dozen decapitated squab (he drains their blood into a bucket after slitting their necks), a gift that excites her deeply. The hunting and cooking and sex ("Ben is like a wild animal," Malabar boasts) are buoyed by a steady tide of bourbon and Manhattan "power packs", needed to take the edge off the reality of what is happening. After the affair has been exposed, the sub-surface aggression comes to a head in a climactic meal of lobster served by Ben's wife to her rival's terrified daughter: "Lily cracked the long tail section of her lobster, causing a projectile of juice and shell to fly across the table and smack me on the cheek. She tore into the creature as if she had a personal vendetta against it, tugging off all 10 legs, twisting the claws until they gave with a poof, and separating the body from the tail ¿ The smell of ocean and carnage filled my nostrils and I felt a wave of nausea." Yet the aggression never quite erupts. This is the deep narrative: on the surface, Brodeur is scrupulously sparing of everyone involved, and especially of her mother. She represents her as a woman at least as much sinned against as sinning, and herself as culpably complicit in Malabar's betrayals - though it's clear that she had no power to resist the grooming to which she was subjected. "It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became, and recognised the hurt that we both caused," she writes. At this point I longed simply to lay the damn book down and put my arms around her. Where did all this bad mothering come from? Malabar's own mother, we learn, was "alcoholic and domineering", her only legacy of value to her daughter a "gemstone-studded collar" that Malabar has promised to pass on to Rennie when she marries. With dreadful inevitability, Adrienne, moved by a last-ditch, subliminal desire to please this 24-carat narcissist, enters into a disastrous marriage with Ben's son. And yet, like Malabar's love, that necklace proves to be forever out of reach. When the moment arrives to hand it over, Malabar decides to wear it herself in a bid to win Ben back, turning her daughter's wedding day - as she already has her life - into her personal battleground. "I wanted her to have it," Brodeur writes. We, in turn, want to scream at her to stop being gracious and start getting angry. There's a promising near-cathartic moment when Brodeur - by now a mother herself - takes the necklace and refuses to give it back: "I pictured every conceivable way I could wound her: I'd never speak to her again. I'd keep my children from her. I'd sell the necklace. I'd throw it into the harbour. I'd strangle her with it." She does none of these things. Wild Game could have been a deadly weapon: instead it's a supremely civilised, and so necessarily tame, attempt at making sense of the horror at the heart of this particular mother-daughter relationship.
Kirkus Review
A memoir about a charismatic mother who embroiled her daughter in a dramatic affair.In a candid, deftly crafted narrative, Brodeur (Man Camp, 2005), co-founder of the magazine Zoetrope: All Story, reveals the family secrets that burdened her life from the age of 14, when she became her mother's confidante and accomplice in a love affair. Her mother was an attractive, charming woman, "a breath of fresh air, an irresistible combination of clever and irreverent," and the author worshipped her. Although the lover was a close and long-standing family friend and the affair betrayed her kind and beloved stepfather's trust, Brodeur willingly helped her mother cover her tracks and distract others from noticing the couple's disappearances, covert touching, and secret glances. For years, she felt thrilled by her role and deeply sympathetic to her mother's needs for love and sex. After her stepfather had suffered several strokes, her mother felt more like a caretaker than a wife. She confided in her daughter that she needed moreand she needed her daughter's support. Brodeur was flattered by her mother's dependence on her, and when she traveled during a gap year, she called home weekly, feeling guilty "for not being more supportive" by phoning more often. Not until she shared her story with a new boyfriendand later with a woman friend and her future husband (who, bizarrely, was her mother's lover's son)did the author realize that someone outside of the family would see the arrangement far differently. "I felt confused," she writes, "suddenly thrust into a state of disequilibrium" by listeners who saw her mother "as perpetrator, not victim." Admitting that her mother's behavior was abusive made her feel "an unbearable sense of disloyalty." Her need to separate herself from her mother grew, however; in college, she tried to create a new identity, different from someone "so consumed by her mother that she hardly knew where her mother ended and she began." That project defined her life for years to come. A vivid chronicle of a daughter's struggle to find herself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When Brodeur (cofounder, Zoetrope: All-Story magazine) was 14, her mother woke her up in the middle of the night in their family's house on Cape Cod to tell her a secret that would derail the course of their lives: her husband's best friend had just kissed her. This kiss jump-started an affair between the author's mother, Malabar, and her stepfather's best friend, Ben, that went on to span decades, with Brodeur as her mother's sole confidante for most of that time. After her mother's admission, the author found herself thrust into the role of accomplice to the couple's infidelity. Keeping a secret of such magnitude had a colossal effect on Brodeur's relationships with her stepfather, her brother, and eventually her own husband. Malabar, an accomplished food writer, and Ben, an avid hunter bringing wild game with him each time he visits the Cape, make this memoir potentially appealing to foodies. VERDICT Brodeur's story explores the bond between mother and daughter and the ripple effect a family secret can have when passed among generations. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 4/1/19.]--Erin Shea, Ferguson Lib., CT