Memoir Monday...

Wild Game by Adrienne Arodeur... On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, 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.

As I was reading about new books, I kept gravitating to this book. I hadn't read a memoir is quite some time and honestly I wasn't really interested in all the celebrity tell alls that seemed to fill the shelves. But there was something about this one that caught my eye. And after reading the first half dozen pages or so I was hooked on Adrienne's writing, with the story unfolding as though it were literary fiction.

Since it's publication in October of this year by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it has won "Best Book" accolades from Library Journal, NPR, Washington Post to name just a few. Not that I make my judgements of a book based on how many "Best" lists it's on, but it did make me a bit more curious. SO, this is now on my nightstand waiting for me to crack it open in 2020. This was going to be my first book of the year, but Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid won out after I was able to get a pre publication copy recently and read a half dozen or so pages of that and had to force myself to put it down. I have a feeling that this is going to be a great reading year!