Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

Today's post is on Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur. It is 256 pages long and is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The cover is a picture of a young girl on her stomach looking out over the ocean. The intended reader is someone who is interested in memoirs. There is some foul language, talk of sex and sexuality, and no violence in this memoir. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the back of the book- 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.

Review- An interesting, moving, and disturbing memoir about a mother who does not have boundaries and a daughter who suffers because of it. Brodeur is taken into her mother's confidence for a years long affair to her step-father's best friend and that becomes one of the most influential moments in her life. Being so important to her mother's great love was  important to Brodeur but she did not discover the damage it did to her emotionally until many years after. We travel with Brodeur from the time of the first kiss all the way to the near present. She has had a full life but a fractured one with lots of secrets because of her mother and the affair. Without giving too much of the drama of the story away, Brodeur learns to be herself and that has it's own highs and lows. If you like memoirs then you should read this one.

I give this memoir a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I was given a copy of this book by a friend.