A NATIONAL BESTSELLER “Exquisite and harrowing.” —New York Times Book Review“This electrifying, gorgeously written memoir will hold you captive until the last word.” —PeopleNAMED 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 * … York Post * Palm Beach Post * Toronto Star * Orange Country Register * Bustle * Bookish * BookPage * Kirkus BBC Culture* Debutiful
A daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity.
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.
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Very well written – interesting – unusual
This book was not my favorite… I don’t enjoy reading about a narcissist and the effect they have on the lives of others
One of the best memoirs I’ve read in a long while. Brimming with food and cooking and a certain zest that’s hard to resist, it’s mainly the story of a charismatic mother and her spellbound daughter. Loved the Cape Cod setting, the dinner parties, the irresistible Malabar.
WOW!
This book is a suppose to be a memoir, but it totally reads like a novel.
What a tumultuous but fascinating relationship between Adrienne and her mother.
Not particularly a book I would read, but read it for participation in a book club and it surely
made for an interesting read.
Beautiful memoir that tucks us into bed as it delivers a lesson. The message being: If you weren’t lucky enough to have a mom who met your basic needs AND your emotional ones, you can certainly build one in for yourself. There is a path out of our suffering, we just need to understand the answer is within ourselves. Brodeur’s story shows us how to find us.
Gloria Squitiro: Author of May Cause Drowsiness and Blurred Vision: The Side Effects of Bravery—YOU, Too! can OVERCOME ANXIETY and live a bigger more carefree life—Become a New and Better You!
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Wild Game is a memoir that dissects an especially complicated bond between a mother and daughter. Adrienne Brodeur’s mother violated acceptable boundaries when she made 14 year old Adrienne her confidante and accomplice to her illicit affair. Desperate for her mother’s love and approval, even to cut her brother out, Adrienne played this role for a decade. The story continues to shock as Adrienne marries her mother’s lover’s son. Set against the backdrop of Orleans on Cape Cod, Adrienne longed for a landscape the way she longed for familial love. In addition , family heirlooms become a stand in for love and devotion. It is a very sad story about the way victims of emotional abuse not only defend their abusers, but replicate bad behavior. In telling this story, Brodeur aims to break the cycle. I enjoyed the writing and language even as I cringed. I calculated that I am the same age as the author and as the only child of a narcissistic, promiscuous mother I felt extreme compassion for the author as I devoured this book.
Unbelievable story and wonderful story teller. I tore through this one!
Amazing read. As an author with a mother-daughter memoir of my own, I couldn’t wait to dive into this brilliant writer’s story. Best book I’ve read in a long time, and one with implications that will stay with you for a long time. A must-read.
I read this on Ruth Ozeki’s recommendation and am glad I did. It was a deeply engaging mother-daughter narrative that I related to as a daughter and new mom, and it was also incredibly sensual. I felt that the narrator had achieved a high level of self-reflective awareness and was able to achieve a fulfilling transformation based on her understanding of her own and her mother’s past. Recommended reading for those interested in relationships, evolution, and forgiveness.
Wild Game is a memoir of Adrienne, who was her mother’s confidante in an affair. Malabar, the mother, woke Adrienne at age 14 to tell her of the start of an affair between herself and Malabar’s husband’s best friend, Ben. Malabar also enlists Adrienne to help Malabar and Ben carry on this affair for about 10 years. Adrienne becomes a player in this love story and it is manifests itself in depression and being under her mother’s thumb for too long.
I was looking forward to reading this memoir, due to all the advance praise for it, but after reading it, I just felt that it was all about the rich not caring who they hurt. The families lived very wealthy and carefree lives on Cape Cod and in NYC, and carried on an affair in front of their spouses, and involved a young daughter in this lie. It made me sick to think of a mother who would do this to her daughter, only caring about her own happiness, and not caring what effect it would have on the daughter. I felt sorry for Adrienne, but I also had a touch of “poor little rich girl” feeling that went along with it.
I also felt that it was odd that all the names in the book would be changed, and then the author names each person in the acknowledgement section of the book.
Thanks to NetGalley and Edelweiss.plus for a free reader copy, any opinions on the book are my own.
#WildGame #AdrienneBrodeur
I received a complimentary copy of this ARC from Houghton Mifflin and Bookish First Giveaway in exchange for an unbiased review.
Andrienne “Rennie” Brodeur shares her story growing up too soon and trying to navigate life within her dysfunctional family. As if life as a teen isn’t confusing enough Adrienne “Rennie” is burdened with keeping her mother’s secrets. The eccentric Malabar is a professional chef and remarried Charles after her divorce. Sadly, he has a stroke shortly after they married which changed the dynamics between the couple.
Although growing up in an affluent family in Boston and vacationing on Cape Cod, life was anything but stable. Her mother loved to entertain and be the object of attention with grand elaborate meals and parties. Her parents spent a lot of time socializing with Ben and Lily who were friends with Charles. Rennie and her brother Peter were educated in private schools while they continued to live in Charles’ mansion until it finally sold.
As much as Rennie feels guilt about keeping her mother’s affair with Ben a secret, she also relishes in the special attention she gets from her mother. It takes many years for her to acknowledge the relationship with her mother was inappropriate. But, as Rennie gets older and tries to find her own way independent from her mother she discovers more family secrets.
The lack of structure and parental guidance leads her to take a gap year in Hawaii. With unreliable family forgetting to reserve a condo for her, she quickly needs to fed for herself. She finds works at Pearl Factory in Kaanapali in Maui Village where she rents a studio apartment. Soon she becomes involved with Adam who was a 25 year old high school drop out selling weed to tourists when he wasn’t working with his father and brother at the printing factory.
This is a moving memoir in which the author explores her past to make sense of her present. Once she distances herself from her mother’s selfish, dysfunctional thinking she begins to accept herself as a unique individual who is not responsible for her mother. She begins to live life for herself with many pitfalls along the way. By falling down and getting back up she developed a strength she didn’t know was possible.
Here is a book you won’t want to put down for anything. Not since The Glass Castle has a memoir managed to convey such a complex family bond, in which love, devotion, and corrosive secrets are inextricably linked. Gorgeous, addictive, unflinching, Wild Game is a must-read.
It’s a rare memoir that reads like a thriller, but Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game manages to do just that. Beautifully written and harrowing, the book left me breathless.
Wild Game tells an extraordinary family story, but this riveting memoir will touch all mothers and daughters. Adrienne Brodeur explores with compassionate clarity the intense bonds of love and need that create a family; and the destruction that can ensue. This is a beautiful book.
Adrienne Brodeur has had decades to consider her glamorous, aspiring, and deeply manipulative mother, along with her complex influence on her life. She appears to have used each day to explore and perfectly distill this legacy of sex, lies, and love into a memoir that is intimate, emotionally gripping, exquisitely shaped. Brodeur’s search for honesty is heroic and graceful; her hard-earned understanding animates this quietly shattering book about how lies passed by parents embed themselves into their children’s hearts.
At just 14 years old, the author’s (married) mother, Malabar, asked her to help conceal her affair with Ben, a married man. This memoir chronicles the aftereffects of that extremely improper and unfair request.
“How quickly she’d decided to change her life course in that moment, tacking to catch a new wind, with me tangled in the riggings.”
This was an intimate look at a Dysfunctional (with a capital D!) and very complicated mother/daughter relationship. I wasn’t sure about it at first but ended up really liking it. It made me sad how much her mother’s selfishness affected the author’s decisions for such a big chunk of her late adolescence and adult life. In the end, I respected the author for the tough choices she made in order to improve her own mental health would recommend this for those who enjoy reading about complex mother/daughter relationships.
“A buried truth, that’s all a lie really is.”
“To our wild game, Malabar.” – Ben referring to the wild game cookbook Malabar was writing but secretly meaning their affair
Location: Massachusetts (Cape Cod), Hawaii (Maui), New York (Columbia University and NYC), and California (San Diego)
I received an advance copy of this book. All opinions are my own.
The variety of characters was intriguing. The mother that is self involved, the stepfather that has had several strokes, the family friends that are invited often to dinner, and of course the daughter who ends up being the most affected by “the kiss,” and all that follows.
The book is well written, and I needed to remind myself several times that is was a memoir and not fiction. It is hard to believe the dynamics of this family, and as a mother, would never put my daughter in such a position. A confidence such as this is too much for a teenage girl to handle emotionally, and should have been shared with a close friend.
All that said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and would definitely recommend it to my friends!
Didn’t think I was going to like this memoir based on the subject matter, but once I started reading, I could not put it down. The author’s mother was such a complex and interesting character and the situation she’d put her daughter in was astounding. But the author’s writing made the book.
I read Wild Game one weekend where I could delve deep into the story without many distractions. As soon as I was done reading I did a deep Google search on narcissism and found Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Malabar, the mother of Adrienne Brodeur, fits the definition of this disorder to a T. How can a mother in good conscience ask her daughter to help her cover up an affair that she started with her best friend’s husband?!!
This story is like a bad car accident: you want to look away from the carnage, but yet you’re so fascinated that you can’t look away. My heart hurts for Adrienne and the weight of keeping such a huge lie to herself for such a long time. I hope that writing her story was cathartic for her, and that she was able to get the closure on this chapter of her life. I can’t imagine how hard writing this must’ve been for her.
Adrienne did an great job writing all the details about the eclectic cuisine that her mother created. This aspect of the story was fascinating and hands down my favorite part of the story.
Wild Game is a heartbreaking narrative with an incomprehensible narcissist, the man she’s obsessed with, and the daughter who had no choice but to keep her dirty little secret, losing herself in the process. A tougher read for me, especially since it triggered memories of my own dealings with a promiscuous parent, but I don’t regret this weekend read at all.
I couldn’t put this book down. Thank you for sharing your story..