
Wild Game
My Mother, Her Secret, and Me
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Narrated by:
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Julia Whelan
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Adrienne Brodeur
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By:
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Adrienne Brodeur
About this listen
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 14, 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.
Cover design by Christopher Moisan
©2019 Adrienne Brodeur (P)2019 Audible, Inc.The one we can’t stop talking about
I wish I could go back in time to scoop up 14-year-old Adrienne Brodeur and tell her everything was going to be okay. In the opening scenes of Wild Game, her mother starts a torrid affair with her husband’s closest friend and enlists her 14-year-old daughter as her main accomplice. The task of arranging ways for her mother to be alone with her lover consumed teenage Adrienne—a toxic arrangement that continued well into her adulthood. Then, in the second half of Wild Game, things get really juicy. It’s source material right out of a soap opera, yet Adrienne Brodeur has a writer’s gift for taking something awful and turning it into a thing of beauty. Above all, this is the story of a daughter who hopelessly loves a mother who crosses all boundaries

About the Creator
Adrienne Brodeur began her career in publishing as the cofounder, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of National Magazine Award-winning Zoetrope: All-Story. She has worked as a book editor and is currently the executive director of Aspen Words, a program of the Aspen Institute. She lives in Cambridge and on Cape Cod.
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Jealous mother
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wow
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Must read
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To sum up this story- I simply didn’t want it to end. Repeat I simply didn’t want it to end.
Beautifully written.
Didn’t want it to end!
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Great memoir
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Just No
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Hard to put down
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Heartbreaking and beautiful
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Mother daughter relationship
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