User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
[2.8] This flimsy memoir about a mother/daughter relationship was a painless, but hollow reading experience. I felt some sympathy for the confusion the author experienced but was mostly detached. Takeaway: You need more than messed-up mother to create a memorable memoir.
Rating: really liked it
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me is the story of Adrienne Brodeur’s tumultuous relationship with her mother, Malabar. The fateful night setting their relationship on its course occurs when Adrienne is just 14 — Her mother wakes her up from sleeping to inform Adrienne she’s just been kissed by Ben Souther, her husband’s best friend. Adrienne becomes an accomplice to this secret affair and while not wholly responsible, helps keep it alive for years to come, as she perpetually seeks her mother’s love, affection, and approval.
I was
not wooed by Malabar’s “charm”. I found her to be manipulative, whiny, and selfish, particularly in her treatment of those she “loved”. It’s clear she loved herself above all else. It was baffling to see how Malabar treated her daughter, putting her in an unfair position at such a young age, asking Adrienne to participate in the facilitation of her sneaking around. It was also surprising how long Adrienne put up with her mother’s antics, well into her own adult life. At 14, I felt for her — At 30, it was harder. You can love your parents and disagree with their belief/actions. At some point, as a coherent adult, you accept this and act accordingly.
When I was offered an ARC of
Wild Game, I gratefully accepted, intrigued by its premise. Even anticipating that I’d enjoy it, I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the book! I thought the story was fascinating and I was dying to see how things would play out. I loved the way this one was written.
Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
I don’t remember much about the experience of reading this book beyond the fact that I had trouble putting it down.
I love memoirs. I sometimes struggle to read nonfiction because I love stories, but there’s a specific part of my love of stories that’s dedicated to those that are true. Autobiographies and memoirs, even of mundane or unknown lives, will never cease to intrigue me, because people and their existences are endlessly fascinating.
This was no exception.
This particular story is relatively unremarkable. It details one young girl’s complicity in her mother’s infidelity, the mother using the daughter for support and deceit and help. It’s not world-shaking. The idea of it doesn’t automatically call for permanent recording in published pages. But it’s beautifully written and real and somehow suspenseful and I truly enjoyed reading it.
Bottom line: Maybe there’s an overwhelming influx of memoirs of late, but there will never seem to be too many for me.
---------
u n p u t d o w n a b l e.
review to come / 4 (?) stars
---------
oh my god the drama.
(thanks to HMH for the arc)
Rating: really liked it
An emotional memoir that I had to keep reminding myself was not a work of fiction.This was a quick, easy read because it was written in such a way that it almost felt like reading someone's diary. You know that feeling of uncovering someone's deepest, darkest secrets - you can't stop reading because you simply have to know how it all plays out? That's exactly how I felt reading
Wild Game .
I found myself shaking my head in disbelief often or wanting to grab the adults in Adrienne's life and give them a good shake to wake them the hell up - especially her mother, Malabar.
What a dysfunctional relationship! I could not believe how manipulative, self-centered and selfish she was. She thought of no one but herself and it was appalling how no one around noticed and were instead so enraptured by her.
Adrienne Brodeur's retelling of her painful youth and how it crippled her decision making and left her damaged was brutally honest. Brodeur's memoir shines a positive light on self love and healing. I applaude Adrienne for finally seeing her mother for what she was and for having the strength to live a more self aware, positive and healthy life.
Rating: really liked it
I LOVED this memoir, couldn't put it down! Elizabeth and I loved it so much that we chose it for the next Happier Podcast Book Club. Read along, join in, we're talking to Adrienne Brodeur in the new year. The subtitle says it all!
Rating: really liked it
I understand that the author had a narcissistic, catty, every-bad-female-stereotype-put-into-one-horrid-woman mother, and I sympathize with her.
However, other than the relationship between the author and her mother, this is a story about an extremely privileged woman (and her family)--who regularly summers in beach houses, cares so much about a piece of jewelry that it defines her relationship with her mother, and was just planning on her parents financially supporting her when she upended her life well into adulthood--and the vapid issues that arise for people who live this kind of lifestyle while also lacking any ambition to do anything meaningful.
For example, if you came from a single-mother family that faced extreme financial hardship, your mother would be too busy working and too stressed about money to be conspiring with her teenage daughter about how to have an affair with a married man. If you came from an immigrant household in which your parents faced adversaries in their home countries you can only imagine, your relationship with them is of gratitude, guilt, responsibility to make them proud, and many other layers, but having an elaborate affair that is the only thing you care about is the last thing anyone has time for. The very concept of applying the situation presented in the book to either of these examples just sounds so laughable when put into perspective. The author even says that she doesn't know what her mom was doing with her time (while the author was going to school), which means she wasn't working. They had an entire section of their mansion dedicated to the help, so she wasn't doing house cleaning either.
Worst of all, the conflict presented in the book could have been easily resolved if the author had just cut ties with her egotistical mother once she became an adult. However, she couldn't do that because she was still financially dependent on her mother (a common trait, it seems, among those who are born rich).
If you were raised in any way less spoiled than the author was (a very easy bar to meet), I don't think you'll find much meaningfulness or beneficial life lessons from this story. Still, it was an entertaining read, kind of like how TV shows of the frivolously wealthy (e.g. Gossip Girl) are entertaining. But, it wasn't a "remarkable story of resilience" that its synopsis marketed it as.
Rating: really liked it
Hollow experience
Rating: really liked it
3.5 Stars
Just imagine it: At the age of fourteen years old, Adrienne Brodeur is awoken in the middle of the night by her mother Malabar and is informed that her stepfather’s best friend, Ben Souther just kissed her mother. Malabar is excited and desperately wants advice from her fourteen year old daughter. And so it begins. Adrienne goes from being her mother’s daughter to her confidante and the one she relies on most. This goes on for the better part of a decade, while Malabar carries on an affair with Ben Souther, behind Charles’, her husband’s back, and behind Lily, Ben’s wife’s back.
Talk about Dysfunction. Malabar never ever stops to think about the consequences suffered by anyone around her, least of all her own daughter.
Of course these events shape Adrienne’s entire life. How could they not?!“WIld Game, My Mother, Her Lover and Me” is a memoir by Adrienne Brodeur which is astounding and wholly unbelievable. I simply could not fathom that a mother could do those things to their own daughter! While this memoir is gripping, I was admittedly left wanting as there are moments that are written in more of a tell v show style of writing that left me wishing I felt more of Adrienne’s emotions throughout. Regardless, Adrienne’s story is compelling enough that I couldn’t help but be drawn into her story wondering how on earth she could survive such a dysfunctional, traumatic childhood and even thrive in adulthood. This memoir is proof positive that strength conquers all!
Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Adrienne Brodeur for the galley to read and review.
Published on Goodreads on 2.24.20.
Rating: really liked it
4.5★
“When my mother aimed her light at you, let it shine on you and allowed you to feel that you held her interest and amused her, it was nearly impossible to look away. Malabar could be intensely charismatic, a breath of fresh air, an irresistible combination of clever and irreverent, and [X] was enchanted.”How on earth to set your moral compass as a fourteen-year-old when your mother chooses you as her confidante about her adulterous affair? Not only that, because you so admire and adore her, you become her co-conspirator.
“Sweetie, you can’t tell anyone. Not a soul. Not your brother, not your father, not your friends. No one. This is serious. Promise me that, Rennie. You must take this secret to your grave.” I promised immediately, thrilled to have landed a starring role in my mother’s drama, oblivious to the fact that I was being outmaneuvered for the second time that night.”Adrienne, ‘Rennie’, is desperate to win top billing in her mother’s affections. Malabar is still grieving for Christopher, her first-born, who died as a toddler. Through no fault of her own, Rennie was born on Christopher’s birthday, so she never really got the whole-hearted celebration of the anniversary of her gracing the world with her presence (as I choose to think of my own birthday). She does have another brother, Peter, whose own sense of place doesn’t figure much in this autobiography.
It is like reading the gossip pages of privileged, well-to-do Americans who live and work on the East Coast and holiday on Cape Cod. Malabar and her two children live with Malabar’s wealthy second husband, whom they all adored – but – Charles has suffered a series of strokes, and while he’s still a charming and wonderful man, he’s not as strong a presence as he was.
His best friend of many years is Ben Souther, who is married to Lily, a relatively frail cancer survivor. Ben is a hunter-gatherer-forager who has trophy heads and brings whatever his latest game is for Malabar to cook for them all.
This is not as strange as it sounds. Malabar is a chef who writes food columns and can cook anything and everything. I’m not a food-show viewer usually, but I did get sucked into Junior MasterChef in Australia this year, where children as young as eleven were making the most incredible dishes and knew so much about ingredients and foods that I’m sure they have all been reincarnated from past lives.
Malabar is exceptional.
“My mother rarely followed recipes. She had little use for them. Hardwired to understand the chemistry of food, she needed only her palate, her instincts, and her fingertips. In a single drop of rich sauce placed on her tongue, she could detect the tiniest hint of cardamom, one lone shard of lemon zest, some whiff of a behind-the-scenes ingredient. She had an innate feel for composition and structure and how temperature might change that.”She is exceptional in more ways than one.
“She also had a keen awareness of the power of this gift, particularly where men were concerned. Armed with sharp knives, fragrant spices, and fire, my mother could create feasts whose aromas alone would entice ships full of men onto the rocks, where she would delight in watching them plunge into the abyss. I knew about the Sirens from reading Greek mythology and marveled at my mother’s powers.”Plus, she is gorgeous.
Malabar, photographed in 1951 in New York City. Photo: Courtesy of Adrienne BrodeurLast of all, or maybe first of all, she is selfish. Malabar has convinced herself and Rennie that she deserves something after the heartbreak of losing a child and suffering along with Charles, although they both claim to love him. Rennie, at fourteen, is impressionable and enjoys the sense of daring as she embarks on ways to put the wooing pair together.
She talks about how it affected her own relationships later, and how she finally came to terms (more or less) with the toll her devotion to her mother took on her own life. Malabar blew hot and cold with her daughter, depending on whether she 'needed' her or not. When she needed Rennie, it was always urgent. When she didn't, Rennie was ignored.
It is a great read, full of intrigue and recipes against the great backdrop of Cape Cod.
“The sun finally pushed through the sky in broad columns of slanted light. The tide was dead low, that still hour that marks the sea’s withdrawal and illuminates the teeming life beneath the surface of our bay: moon snails pushing plow-like across the sandy bottom, horseshoe crabs coupling, schools of minnows moving in perfect synchronicity. As the procession of sunbeams merged into one, the day became long with light, and a space in my mind opened like that between a boat and a dock.”If you’d like to read part of the beginning, she has shared it here, in the August 2019 issue of
‘Vogue’.
https://www.vogue.com/article/adrienn...
She changed all the names except for hers, her mother’s and her father’s, but with a name like Malabar, she and the others are easy to find easily online.
Thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the preview copy which I’ve had for far too long and from which I’ve quoted.
Rating: really liked it
Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/
Soooooooooooooooooooooo apparently this is a thing . . . . .
Which of course I didn’t know about but somehow was well-prepared for anyway due to my lack of timely reviewing. Here’s a selection that I read on September 1st and never
wrote imaged up.
Full disclosure: I was offered an advanced copy of
Wild Game and took it as soon as I saw the comparison to . . . . .
I don't think I'll ever stop doubting why Average Joes feel
their story is one to be told, – especially ones like
The Glass Castle or this that air alllllllllllllllllllllll of the family’s dirty laundry to the world. I automatically assume it’s due to the fact that . . . . .
That being said, I totally get why a publishing house would pick up this story because I pretty much looked like this while I was reading it . . . .
There’s just something about the trainwreck factor that sucks me right in. And the story here about a mother using her child as her confidante as she engages in a decades-long affair with her husband’s best friend????
Malabar (Barf, right? How could she not be a complete douche?) would have made for a great Real Housewife of Cape Code and could have seriously used a copy of the APA’s Textbook of Psychiatry . . . . .
4 Stars for the un-put-down-able factor.
ARC provided by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
Why I love it
by Jessica Turner
I’m not a big nonfiction reader, but I devoured
Wild Game (pun intended). As a mother of three kids, I’m acutely aware of the role I have in their life and appreciate the sacred gift to usher them into adulthood. Maybe that explains my shock and utter dismay over this true story of the author Adrienne’s relationship with her mother, Malabar. The ways in which Malabar repeatedly crossed lines that should never be crossed was unconscionable.
In
Wild Game, Malabar pursues an affair with her disabled husband’s best friend, using her daughter, Adrienne, as a distraction, confidante, and accomplice to keep her relationship a secret and ensure its success. Adrienne’s desire to protect her mother—a deeply flawed but undeniably magnetic woman—and her blindness to the inappropriateness of her mother’s actions is heart-wrenching. I was dumbfounded at the manipulation and selfishness of Adrienne’s mother.
Wild Game is sure to be one of 2019’s must-read memoirs, and fans of
The Glass Castle and
Educated will love that it is similarly compulsively readable. I read it in 24 hours and am still thinking about it weeks later. Adrienne’s mother is as enigmatic as she is selfish—how could anyone act like this? You’ll be talking about just that with friends, strangers—anyone who will listen—for a long time.
Read more at: https://bookofthemonth.com/wild-game-559
Rating: really liked it
This was a train wreck that I couldn't look away from.
TW: adultery, emotional manipulation, incest, depression, suicidal ideation, death of a loved one
Rating: really liked it
Adrienne is fourteen years old and asleep one summer night when her mother wakes her to say that she has been kissed by Ben Souther.
After that moment, Adrienne becomes her mother’s closest friend, ally, and enabler in this affair. Did I mention Ben Souther is Adrienne’s father’s best friend?
The affair continues for years, but not without its consequences for everyone involved, including Adrienne when she embarks on her own marriage.
Adrienne is brutally honest about her journey in the relationship she has with her mother. It’s not been easy to make amends. She also has a journey within herself and finds her own limitless strength. Fans of emotional memoirs, you will adore this. It’s powerful and poignant and reads like the best kind of fiction; it just happens to be based on someone’s real life experiences.
I received a complimentary copy from the publisher.
Many of my reviews can also be found on instagram: www.instagram.com/tarheelreader
Rating: really liked it
As we walk through life, we sometimes fail to give a voice to the sharp-thorned bramble that attaches itself and clings to our very being.
In Wild Game, Adrienne Brodeur reflects upon the very disjointed and convoluted relationship with her mother, Malabar. Whether with full conscience or inadvertently, we tend to leave fingerprints of our own shortcomings and quirks on the minds of our children. We will come to find that Malabar opened it all full-throttle.
Fourteen is a tender age of becoming. We search through trial and error to place our feet upon the unsteady ground of adolescence. And this is where the uneven relationship rears its jagged head in regard to Adrienne (Rennie) and Malabar. Malabar wakes Rennie from a sound sleep with a bizarre telling of being kissed that evening by her husband's best friend, Ben. Malabar transfers her excitement to Rennie. Rennie only wishes happiness for her mother and agrees to be the conduit in this hidden relationship. She follows along with the couple as a cover for their indiscretions having no clue as to what chaos Malabar has set in motion.
Adrienne Brodeur unlatches the door to her early life and we, as readers, will view the heavy impact all of this will have on Rennie for the rest of her life. We hear so much in regard to fathers/daughters and mothers/sons relationships. Brodeur unpacks this one with a still loving hand towards the one individual with the greatest impact on her life. The manipulation of Malabar will be experienced by offering the rose petal of a kiss that fateful evening rather than the honesty of an illicit affair on her daughter's pillow. The web spun by Malabar is one that is impossible to untangle.
But through it all, we honor Adrienne Brodeur's honesty in the retelling of her painful youth leading to her own adulthood. There is almost a gasp as we acknowledge how crippled her own decision making had become under the influence of Malabar who became flawed and damaged by her own mother. Leaping to the other side of a relationship still doesn't stop the genetics coursing through our bloodstreams at times. But Brodeur shines the light on the possibility it can be done.
I received a copy of Wild Game through Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an honest review. My thanks to them and to Adrienne Brodeur for the opportunity.
Rating: really liked it
This was truly a page turner, and though I didn't actually like anyone in the book, I was truly absorbed by the story. Brodeur has a real talent for making nonfiction read like fiction and I couldn't put it down. I could see this being turned into a film, and I'd be curious to see that. Recommended!
Find more reviews and bookish fun at http://www.princessandpen.com
