Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

Adrienne Brodeur's memoir recounts how, at the age of fourteen, she became the keeper of her mother's secret affair and spent decades entangled in the deception before slowly reclaiming her own life. Brodeur frames the story through the metaphor of Cape Cod, where buried things surface and disappear with the tides, much as hidden truths can materialize unexpectedly.

The story begins in the summer of 1980 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Adrienne's mother, Malabar, a culinary virtuoso and former journalist who studied at Le Cordon Bleu, was married to her second husband, Charles Greenwood, a reserved intellectual who founded Plimoth Plantation, the living-history museum. Charles had suffered debilitating strokes before their wedding, leaving him partially paralyzed. Ben Souther, Charles's closest friend since boyhood, arrived at the family's beach house with his wife, Lily, bearing a dozen plucked squabs. Malabar transformed the birds into an extraordinary meal, and the dinner crackled with energy; Adrienne noticed Ben's gaze returning repeatedly to her mother.

That night, Malabar woke fourteen-year-old Adrienne to confess that Ben had kissed her during a walk after dinner. Trembling with excitement, Malabar asked Adrienne to help facilitate a relationship with Ben and extracted a promise of absolute secrecy. Adrienne, thrilled to be chosen as her mother's confidante, agreed immediately.

Brodeur provides essential backstory. Malabar was born in Bombay, India, in 1931 to Bert and Vivian, two volatile parents who married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again. Vivian had an alcohol addiction and was domineering. The family's foundational tragedy was the death of Adrienne's older brother, Christopher, who choked on a piece of meat at age two and a half during Malabar's first marriage to Adrienne's father, Paul Brodeur. Adrienne was born on Christopher's birthday and grew up feeling she was a replacement child. Malabar inherited from Vivian an Indian jeweled necklace she deemed "priceless," promising Adrienne she could wear it on her wedding day if she was "very, very good." The necklace becomes a symbol of conditional maternal love throughout the memoir.

After the kiss, Malabar began confiding exclusively in Adrienne, cutting her brother Peter out. She confessed she had been depressed for years and felt obligated to marry Charles after he fell ill. Adrienne constructed an elaborate system of lies to cover for Malabar's trysts with Ben in New York City. Her role expanded to include chaperoning after-dinner walks until the couple slipped away to be alone. Malabar insisted the affair was altruistic: She and Ben were honoring their wedding vows by staying with their ailing spouses.

When Malabar grew frustrated by insufficient time with Ben, she and Adrienne devised a scheme: a wild-game cookbook, titled Wild Game, that required the two couples to meet regularly for recipe testing. The cookbook became the perfect cover for continued intimacy.

At seventeen, overwhelmed by unacknowledged guilt, Adrienne deferred her Columbia University acceptance and left for a gap year. On Maui, she fell in love with a drifter named Adam and told him about the affair. He responded with shock, but weekly phone calls with Malabar pulled Adrienne back into the affair's orbit despite her physical distance.

Adrienne returned home in 1984 and slipped back into old patterns. Ben revealed that Charles had confronted him about the affair; Ben denied it, and Charles believed the denial. During Adrienne's first semester at Columbia, Malabar called in a panic: Hazel, Charles's caregiver, had discovered evidence of the affair and was demanding $10,000 for silence. Adrienne devised a counterplan involving false letters that discredited Hazel in advance, leaving Adrienne more deeply complicit than ever.

Charles underwent aneurysm repair surgery in October 1985 and initially survived. Malabar went on a date with Ben the night of the operation. Days later, Charles suffered a massive stroke and died alone in his hospital room. Adrienne returned to college wracked with guilt.

After about a year of regret, the old Malabar resurfaced. During a joint family vacation to the Bahamas, Adrienne met Jack Souther, Ben and Lily's adopted son, and they began a secret romance. Malabar encouraged the connection, viewing it as binding the families together. Adrienne moved to San Diego after graduating from Columbia without having told Jack about their parents' affair.

In San Diego, Adrienne's father married Margot, a bookstore owner who became a crucial maternal figure. Margot told Adrienne that books could help her forge a new narrative. When Adrienne tested Jack's willingness to hear the secret, he declined.

In late February 1990, Ben called Jack to confess the affair. He had told Lily, who forced him to choose, and he chose to stay with her. Malabar was devastated. Before the wedding, Adrienne discovered Malabar planned to wear the family necklace to dazzle Ben into regretting his decision. The necklace Adrienne had believed would be hers would instead serve as Malabar's weapon.

Jack and Adrienne married on July 21, 1990, on Malabar's Cape Cod property. Malabar, wearing the necklace, shared a forbidden dance with Ben at the reception. The next morning, Adrienne told her mother she could no longer serve as her confidante.

On her honeymoon, Adrienne experienced the onset of serious depression. Back in San Diego, the condition worsened. She began cutting herself and drinking to sleep. At Margot's urging, she saw a psychiatrist who suggested Adrienne was undergoing the separation from her mother she never completed as an adolescent. When lithium was added to her medication, Adrienne fantasized about using Jack's gun while lying in their bathtub. She stopped all medication and resolved to move to New York.

In November 1992, Lily died of a heart attack. Ben and Malabar moved in together within two months and married in September 1993, despite objections from their children. Adrienne and Jack's marriage quietly fell apart. During this period, Malabar told Adrienne she did not want Adrienne anywhere near her, a sentence that formed a deep wound. During their estrangement, Adrienne devoted herself to friendships and self-discovery, cofounding the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.

In 2002, Adrienne went on a blind date with Nick Keane, a man from a stable, large family. They married in 2005 and had two children. When her daughter was born, Adrienne envisioned generations of dysfunction toppling forward like dominoes and resolved to break the chain.

After Ben died of a stroke in 2013, Malabar's cognitive decline accelerated. She gave Adrienne the necklace, then immediately tried to take it back. After Malabar was diagnosed with an aggressive melanoma, Adrienne attempted the conversation she had waited her whole life to have. Malabar said of her own mother, "I know my mother loved me, but not so much as she loved herself." Adrienne told Malabar she felt the same way. Instead of an apology, Malabar asked for the necklace back. Adrienne walked through the dark to her own family, who wrapped her in a group embrace. She reflects that she and Malabar are not "two halves of the same whole"; each time Adrienne fails to become more like her mother, she becomes more like herself.

In the epilogue, Brodeur, now 53, walks Cape Cod's outer beach collecting sea glass. Malabar is sinking into dementia. Adrienne's daughter is nearly fourteen, the same age Adrienne was when the secret began. When the girl comes to her confused by a school assignment about a time when adults were unavailable, Adrienne blinks back tears. Her daughter's bewilderment is proof that the cycle has been broken.