{"id":2449806,"date":"2019-10-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-13T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=314234"},"modified":"2019-10-13T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-13T06:00:00","slug":"wild-game-a-mother-daughter-memoir-by-aspen-words-adrienne-brodeur-to-be-published-this-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/wild-game-a-mother-daughter-memoir-by-aspen-words-adrienne-brodeur-to-be-published-this-week\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Wild Game,\u2019 a mother-daughter memoir by Aspen Words\u2019 Adrienne Brodeur, to be published this week"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Aspen Words executive director speaking at the Summer Words conference in June. Brodeur’s memoir, “Wild Game,” will be published Tuesday.<\/strong>
Nick Tininenko\/Courtesy photo<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Aspen knows Adrienne Brodeur as an ambassador to the literary arts \u2014 as the composed, witty and intelligent executive director of the literary nonprofit Aspen Words who takes the stage with authors to delve into their work.<\/p>\n

But Aspen, and the rest of the reading world, is soon to learn much more.<\/p>\n

Brodeur spent much of her life reckoning with the role she played in abetting an extra-marital affair her mother carried on from Brodeur\u2019s teenage years through early adulthood. Once she\u2019d sorted out the trauma and learned from mistakes and found her path outside the shadow of her narcissistic mother, she began trying to write her story.<\/p>\n

Now, to Brodeur\u2019s surprise, her memoir recounting the experience \u2014 \u201cWild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, And Me\u201d<\/a> \u2014 is one of the most anticipated books of the season.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s exciting and it\u2019s scary, too, for sure,\u201d Brodeur said recently over coffee at the Aspen Art Museum\u2019s rooftop cafe, anticipating publication and a media blitz that begins Monday with an appearance on the \u201cToday\u201d show. \u201cBecause with memoirs \u2014 unlike other genres \u2014 your life gets judged along with your writing and your book.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWild Game\u201d will be published Tuesday following two years of hype and often breathless prepublication attention.<\/p>\n

The book has drawn early praise, not only from the industry press including Publisher\u2019s Weekly<\/a> and Library Journal<\/a> (both gave starred reviews) but from mainstream entertainment outlets. Brodeur and \u201cWild Game\u201d have been featured in recent months in People magazine, Town & Country, Bustle, Business Insider and Entertainment Weekly, which called it \u201cthe next big memoir.\u201d<\/a> Vogue<\/a> ran an excerpt. It\u2019s a Book of the Month Club pick and a fixture on autumn most-anticipated lists. (Read The Aspen Times review<\/a> on page A8).<\/p>\n

\u201cWild Game\u201d is positioned to follow the path of bestselling, acclaimed and hotly debated recent family memoirs like Tara Westover\u2019s \u201cEducated\u201d and Jeannette Walls\u2019 \u201cThe Glass Castle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brodeur, a longtime book editor who splits her time between Aspen and Cambridge, Massachusetts, never thought of it in that way in the years she was working on it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was writing the book, I wasn\u2019t writing for an audience and I wasn\u2019t thinking anyone was waiting for it \u2014 I didn\u2019t even really know why I was doing it at the time,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was just this thing I was doing and doing and doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019d begun writing it to make sense of the experience for herself. To better understand how, beginning at age 14, she served as her mother\u2019s confidante and co-conspirator, and in what ways her deceptions shaped her own struggles with depression and fraught relationships (including a marriage to her mother\u2019s lover\u2019s son).<\/p>\n

As a child she was certainly blameless. But the memoir wrestles with why she continued to abet her mother into her 20s, eventually taking some shocking steps to sideline those who might expose the secret. Why did she continue as an accomplice for so long?<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s been the thing I\u2019ve always wondered in my life,\u201d she said, \u201cand there\u2019s the recovering and getting out from under that and the changing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The memoir opens the night when her mother, Malabar, woke up Brodeur to confess that she had kissed her husband\u2019s best friend. The author always knew the book had to begin there.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe next day, I was totally different,\u201d she recalled. \u201cIt always seemed to me that\u2019s where I was going to start from.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the narrative is unsparing in detail, it\u2019s not salacious and isn\u2019t looking to settle any scores. Brodeur writes with compassion about her mother \u2014 who is still alive but suffering from dementia \u2014 and about her young self. There also is an undeniable charm to Malabar\u2019s boozy and self-involved approach to parenting in the 1980s, a far cry from the hyper-involved helicopter-parent standard of today. And there\u2019s glamour in the sumptuously described domestic scenes in their Cape Cod home, where Malabar \u2014 a food writer and Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef \u2014 concocts lavish meals for her family, her lover, his family and other guests (\u201cWild Game\u201d was to be the title of a cookbook, co-authored by Malabar and her lover, identified as the pseudonymous Ben Souther).<\/p>\n

In the margins of the story, we see, too, Brodeur\u2019s development as a reader and a writer. A step-sister plies her with novels that help make sense of her twisted relationship with her mother. Her journal transforms from a child\u2019s trifle to a grown-up confessional overnight, after her mother conscripts her.<\/p>\n

Given the strange mother-daughter relationship at its center, Brodeur didn\u2019t believe the memoir was bound for a wide audience.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t imagine a lot of people were going to relate to it,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought the writing was good because I worked very hard on it, but I never thought, \u2018Oh, this is the one people are going to connect to,\u2019 because it is shocking and it is unusual. I don\u2019t think a lot of people have had a similar experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet as she started sharing pages, Brodeur began hearing stories from readers about their own knotty mother-child relationships.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople can relate to the power dynamic and to how much we love our mothers, especially when we\u2019re young and in their thrall,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s the unexpected thing that people are relating to in the book.\u201d<\/p>\n

The public\u2019s first glimpse of Brodeur\u2019s story came in a 2012 \u201cModern Love\u201d column for the New York Times titled \u201cI Am My Own In-Law,\u201d which takes a more flippant tone than the memoir.<\/p>\n

An early draft of \u201cWild Game\u201d drew bids from 14 publishers in September 2017 and earned Brodeur an unspecified seven-figure advance from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, capturing the attention of the publishing world<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The excitement of selling the book, however, was soon leavened by the realization that she would be sharing her most intimate memories with a reading public not predisposed to liking her. Brodeur recalled going to a book club meeting with friends, just days after she\u2019d sold \u201cWild Game,\u201d but before any of them knew about it. They were discussing a memoir that night.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first thing one of these intelligent and wonderful women said was, \u2018Well, I thought the author was lying,\u2019\u201d Brodeur recalled. \u201cI was like, \u2018Ugh!\u2019 It was this sudden realization that this is what I\u2019m going to face.\u201d<\/p>\n

With \u201cWild Game\u201d soon to reach readers, Brodeur is preparing for such scrutiny.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a startlingly different skill set to write a book versus going out and talking about it, especially in these tiny sound bites,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her 30-stop book tour begins Monday in Manhattan and will come to Aspen and Denver in December. Several stops on the tour include public interviews with Aspen Summer Words faculty including J. Courtney Sullivan, Dani Shapiro, Richard Russo and Tom Barbash.<\/p>\n

Movie rights to the book sold soon after Harcourt bought the manuscript. A film adaptation is in development by \u201cEdge of Seventeen\u201d writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig. Brodeur has read Kelly\u2019s screenplay, which assuaged the standard author fears about Hollywood adaptations.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe gets it,\u201d Brodeur said of the filmmaker. \u201cI\u2019ve seen a brilliant first script. \u2026 Arguably, a lot of people will remember the movie and not the book, so it\u2019s nice to know I\u2019m not cringing. She knows it\u2019s not some \u2018Mommie Dearest\u2019 thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the book is a success, it could afford Brodeur the opportunity to write full-time and drop her Aspen Words gig. Although she hopes \u201cWild Game\u201d does lead to more books \u2014 she\u2019s currently mulling a novel \u2014 she says she doesn\u2019t plan to leave Aspen Words.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a better literary job than the one I have,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat\u2019s great about Aspen Words is, in addition to bringing people out here, it\u2019s a lively network of writers and publishers. It\u2019s been great for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brodeur said her work with Aspen Words, especially how it\u2019s connected her with emerging writers sharing unpolished manuscripts, is what push her to tell her story in \u201cWild Game.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo many people were willing to share the raw stuff, so that made me more comfortable in that zone,\u201d she said. \u201cThat all of these people are willing to be vulnerable in that way, I think it gave me courage.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aspen Words executive director speaking at the Summer Words conference in June. Brodeur’s memoir, “Wild Game,” will be published Tuesday.Nick Tininenko\/Courtesy photo Aspen knows Adrienne Brodeur as an ambassador to the literary arts \u2014 as the composed, witty and intelligent executive director of the literary nonprofit Aspen Words who takes the stage with authors to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2449806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-16 23:32:24","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2449806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2449806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2449806\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2449806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2449806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2449806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}