414. Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by: Drue Emerson, Valerie Flores
Author: Adrienne Brodeur
Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
256 pages, published October 15, 2016
Reading Format: Book
Summary
Wild Game is an interesting and unique memoir. Adrienne Brodeur begins her story on a hot July night on Cape Cod when and her mother Malabar woke her at midnight to tell her 14 year old daughter “Ben Souther just kissed me.” With these words, the magnetic, complicated, larger than life Malabar started a years long affair and dragged Adrienne in as her accomplice and confidante.
Quotes
“Loneliness is not about how many people you have around. It’s about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you’re able to be yourself.”
“Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it. For years and years, my job was to pile on sand – fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated – in an effort to keep my mother’s secret buried.”
“I know that no one’s story is simple. And no single story tells the whole truth.”
“I turned to memory, knowing full well that it is revisionist and that each time we remember something, we alter it slightly, massaging our perspective and layering it with new understanding in order to make meaning in the present.”
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SøREN KIERKEGAARD”
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —ANAïS NIN”
“As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.”
“My mother had narrowed her vision and chosen happiness, and I had willingly signed on, both of us ignoring the dangers of the new terrain.”
“Blink, and you’ll miss your treasure. Blink again, and you’ll realize that the truth you thought was completely hidden, has materialized some ungainly part of it revealed under new conditions.”
“All I knew at that moment was I felt lucky. My mother had chosen me , and, together, we were embarking on a great adventure.”
“If there was one truth that I’d learned from all my reading, it was this: Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene. This time, that someone was me.”
“I knew only what pleased my mother; I didn’t have a moral compass. It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became and recognized the hurt that we both caused.”
“Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I’d been running for so very long and pass along the inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. My daughter could do her best to outrun it…
Or I could slow down, catch my breath, and look mindfully for a new path. There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.”
My Take
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Wild Game, a compelling page turning memoir. Author Adrienne Brodeur tells a fascinating story of the many years she spent since the age of fourteen as her mother’s accomplice in hiding an affair with her stepfather’s best friend. Brodeur paints a fascinating portrait of her mother Malabar whose unparalleled narcissism almost ruins her daughter’s life. Highly recommended.
