Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur is a wild memoir. Every time you think, wow, that was pretty messed up, it gets even more messed up. Although none of the major characters in this book are particularly likeable, it’s almost impossible to stop reading.

Adrienne’s mother, Malabar, starts a dramatic secret affair with her husband’s married best friend, Ben. Not only is this affair is clearly a terrible idea because the two couples regularly socialize, Malabar pulls her teenage daughter into the deceptions. These start out with making excuses for Ben and Malabar to meet, covering for her mother’s trips to Manhattan with Ben, and go on to covering up a blackmail attempt. Malabar waits for years for her husband to die, at one point literally going from his hospital bed to see her lover. Adrienne is almost in a magical thrall to her mother, accepting this as sweet and caring. She’s so caught up in the story, which eventually leads to Adrienne marrying Ben’s son, Jack. It’s a ride, and I could not stop reading.  I was just dying to see what would happen next, even though I wasn’t strongly rooting for any of the characters.

There’s a bit of Rich People Non-Problems here, where no one really has to go to work so they have a lot of time for eating, drinking, travel, affairs, and navel-gazing about it all. When Adrienne needs to mull things over, she does it from Maui beaches or moves out of her married home in San Diego to her own Murray Hill apartment. Ben is described as a “real” fisherman, not a fishing hobbyist like those Cape Cod tourists, but “real” here doesn’t mean a career, it means traveling the world for the most pristine, exotic spots to fish. It makes for a beautiful setting, and adds to the unreality of the story. At one point, young Adrienne considers the wealth her stepfather Charles has brought to their family. Before that, they just had an Upper East Side apartment and summers on Cape Cod, and their summer cottage was really small.

The affair is front and center, but the story also touches on the  quieter non-problems of prep schools and admission to top colleges, of family connections to major publications, of household staff (Oh, that one turned into an actual problem) and of course keeping up appearances in a massive family estate with a slightly less massive family trust.  

After recently reading a novel that felt like a memoir, this was a memoir that felt like a novel, until towards the end, when the author-narrator tells her aging mother Malabar, who now has mild dementia, about the book. So much of the plot hung on Ben and Malabar’s plan to wait until Lily and Charles were dead to reveal their affair, it seems like a final screw-you to make sure Malabar is still alive, although confused and weak, and to publicly reveal the secrets of her life this way. The narrator is no longer used as a teenage pawn in others’ dysfunction, she’s carrying on the family tradition of using others. It was a bit upsetting to remember these are real people and real relationships, not a wild and thrilling novel. Ben Souther and his son Jack get aliases, but Malabar is called Malabar. It’s hard not to see this twisted, page-turning book as personal revenge, too.