Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur is a memoir that details the complicated and dysfunctional relationship Brodeur experienced with her mother, Malabar. This cycle spans several decades and although there is the storyline of how Brodeur became entangled in her mother’s affair, it wasn’t the most powerful part of this book for me.

What really spoke to me was how much this story shared the challenges of cycles repeating themselves in families. These complexities can continue to pass on generation after generation and Brodeur truly shows how hard dysfunction can be to break. The writing detailing how she confronted her past is raw and full of emotions and whether you can relate to this story or not, this is not a book to be missed.

Brodeur show more shares vividly, the complexities of their mother/daughter relationship and how it has affected her from her childhood to now during middle-age. Whether it is in romantic relationships or the relationships she has with her own children, it heavily impacts her to this day.

Brodeur reflects so honestly about how challenging it was as she began to distance herself from Malabar as an adult. While she knew her relationship wasn’t “normal” or healthy, it was hard not to fall back into the paths which had been ingrained in her family for so long.

While this book wasn’t easy to read at times, I appreciated that it wasn’t black or white and Brodeur is able to look at this deeply conflicted relationship with humanity and empathy. I stopped and reread sections of the book because the reflections on the journey of finding herself while batting the undercurrent of her family dynamics were so insightful.

I also appreciated that she recounted the impact the other people in her life had had on her and her ability to move forward. Brodeur’s ability to share such introspection and poignant details amidst the difficulties she endured made this book what it was and it won’t be one I will ever forget.

Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an advanced copy of this book. All opinions are my own. show less

A schadenfreude soap opera that reminds me of watching Dallas when I was a kid or Tiger King on Netflix last night. Brodeur's mother marries a rich and sickly bookworm and some years down the road has an affair with his vigorous and vibrant best friend. Fourteen-year-old Brodeur is recruited as confidante and accomplice, aiding and abetting the affair's cover-up. Things get even a little more twisted before they get better . . . or at least as good as they're going to get. Outrageous and sad.

Side note: It seems weird for the author to go to the trouble to use pseudonyms for everyone in the book and then basically out them all in the Acknowledgments. What was the point of that? A legal department thing?

In this dramatic memoir, author Adrienne Brodeur tells the story of her enmeshed relationship with her domineering, manipulative mother Malabar. When Adrienne is only fourteen years old, Malabar embarks upon a love affair with the male half of a friendly couple. Malabar makes her teenage daughter her confidante and co-conspirator. Things get even more complicated (if such were possible) when Adrienne falls in love with her mother's lover's adopted son.

Malabar and her lover remind me of this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other show more people clean up the mess they had made.”

This memoir is a beautifully written testament to the corrupting powers of entitlement and privilege. Well worth reading. show less

This memoir opens with a startling event: the 14 year old narrator's mother bursts into her room to share that she has been kissed by her husband's best friend. That a parent would seek out a young teenager to be her confidante and co-conspirator in adultery shows us what the mother, Malabar, and the daughter, Adrienne (Rennie) are made of. The writing is excellent here - the pacing, the plot, Rennie's description of her own excitement and shame, and her subsequent bout with depression - and it's almost enough to feel that Rennie's complicity is justified. But not Malabar's - she is also the daughter of a horrorshow mother - which still can't vindicate her selfish actions, nor can the divorce of Rennie's parents and the early death of show more their first child. I chose this book because I heard the author at a local reading in Beverly, MA, supporting her wonderful new novel Little Monsters, and you too should read them as a satisfying set. show less

This memoir begins with Mary Oliver's poem about receiving a box of darkness. I think the poem was the perfect beginning to the book. It gives the reader the sense that something dark is coming and the author acknowledges that darkness. But it also portends that there is some resolution in the story.

The story is about a mother, Malabar, who inflicts a horrendous duty on her 14 yo daughter, Adrienne, by making her an intimate to the mother's adulterous affair with her husband's best friend.
The story delivers a salient truth:
It's impossible to go through life without injury...physical, psychic, emotional. The important thing is what you do with that injury. One can work to resolve the issues and learn from them, developing a sense of show more resilience. Or one can draw into oneself and nurse the injuries for a lifetime. I think Malabar and Adrienne demonstrate those two responses.

It would seem that this book would invite a lot of projection on the part of the reader, especially for women with a complicated mother/daughter relationship in their lives.

I was impressed by Adrienne's ability to empathize with her mother. However, the story about her daughter in the epilogue made me wonder if she had perhaps over compensated a bit. show less

It is not often a memoir sucks you so far in that you fail to come up for air until you have turned the last page. In fact, I can only remember one other occurrence of this and that was The Glass Castle, which happens to be one of my FAVORITE books. Given that, it is unsurprising this book was an instant favorite for me.

Adrienne is just 14 years old when the direction of her life is altered by her mother waking her to inform her she'd just kissed Adrienne's step-father's best friend. The next decade is filled with Adrienne assisting her mother in her elicit affair as Adrienne adores being within her mother's magnetic orbit.

The mother-daughter relationship captured within this book is both engaging and disturbing.

*Disclaimer: A review show more copy of this book was provided by the publisher. All opinions are my own. show less

Other people's lives are endlessly fascinating, especially the hidden pieces of those lives. One of the reasons we read is to inhabit these lives so very different from ours, at least for a a little time. Adrienne Brodeur's memoir about her glamorous mother Malabar, who entrusts fourteen year old Rennie with the knowledge of Malabar's affair with her husband’s married, best friend, making Rennie both confidante and co-conspirator, and the effects of this knowledge on her life and relationships, offers the reader a life it is impossible to look away from.

Brodeur has written an astonishing memoir of mothers and daughters, dysfunction, complicity, lies, and secrets. She looks back, not only at the obviously inappropriate revelations of show more her mother but also at her own deep desire to be her mother's ally, the favorite, to be special, the one who would aid and abet her mother in this affair despite her love for her stepfather. She presents the reality of her relationship with her mother and her knowledge of this affair as she remembers it, not letting her mother off the hook for her questionable decision to include her young teen in her deception but not letting herself off the hook either for the thrill she felt in safeguarding this knowledge. Her writing is self-reflective and honest. She knows she's writing of rich people behaving badly but she embraces that without apologizing for it.

Without excusing her selfish and toxic behavior, Brodeur tries to convey the magnetism and appeal of her mother but she's not entirely successful. And her own complicity can easily be forgiven when she's a child but the reader will find it harder to understand her loyalty to this secret once she is older and it threatens her own relationship and marriage. This is a perfect book for book clubs who can delve into the very real, even if it reads like fiction, impact Brodeur's mother had on her life and in forming the person, wife, and mother she has grown into being and the rocky journey of self-discovery that got her there. show less