Wild Game


Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me is a memoir by Adrienne Brodeur, published in October 2019 by HMH Books.
It is about herself hiding an affair of her mother, Malabar Schleiter Brodeur, from her mother's husband beginning in July 1980. Brodeur was 14 years old at that time.
Ilana Masad of National Public Radio stated that the novel, "for all its luscious prose and tantalizing elements, is ultimately about the slow and painful process of losing a mother."

Background

The author used her parents' actual names but changed the names of other parties.
Brodeur stated that her mother supported her efforts to have the book written; by the time it was completed, the mother's illness was too severe for her to read the book. Malabar Brodeur, by 2019, had dementia.

Content

Masad wrote that the work "reads very much like a novel with a first-person narrator". Masad states that the way Brodeur maintains her mindset that hiding her mother's affair was a good thing to do until the latter part of the memoir makes it "especially novel-like".
Emily Rapp Black of The New York Times wrote that the author "does not reject her mother, but neither does she become her or soft-pedal the ways in which Malabar continues to wound her."

Reception

Jennifer Haupt of Psychology Today wrote that the book is "inspiring" and "moving, masterful".
Publisher's Weekly, which deemed it a featured book, wrote that it is "page-turning" and "This layered narrative of deceit, denial, and disillusionment is a surefire bestseller."