Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover & Me

by Adrienne Brodeur; 256 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, March 31, 2020

Take note that this title was highly regarded by NPR, BuzzFeed, Slate, People, Chicago Public Library, Real Simple, Library Journal, Washington Post, Amazon, and the CBC. A New York Times review called it exquisite and harrowing, gorgeously written and insightful. All of them are wrong.

Adrienne Brodeur writes about her mother's narcissism without recognizing her own or growing out of it in any way. As Susan, who has a penchant for writing reviews on Amazon put it, "A dysfunctional mother, her equally dysfunctional daughter. Why all the hype?"

The author is always the main character of a memoir (duh), and like any genre, we hope that character leads us on an adventure and incites our emotions as she grows.

The trouble here is that it's hard to be sympathetic toward a character as self-indulgent and self-absorbed as this one. She tells you about her emotional growth, but what she shows is much the opposite, a flat line of navel contemplation and so little self-awareness that one begins to wonder whether the reader is a stooge or the author is.

In just one chapter, she criticizes her mother and stepfather for their lack of consideration regarding the effect their behavior has on others while never blinking at being in a marriage in which she and her husband decide to see other people.

She professes to have risen above her mother's materialism while still becoming infuriated over the long-promised necklace.

She leads a life of astonishing wealth yet seems entirely unaware of her position and opportunity. The result is a poor-little-rich-girl tale in which the author feels entitled to reader sympathy that's never earned; the mommy-didn't-love-me-enough whine set against the extraordinarily privileged, self-indulgent life story just doesn't play.

Brodeur tells she outgrew her mother and grandmother's narcissism but what we see is a woman carrying on the tradition while telling herself, and us, that she isn't. The result is a loud sigh, a giant eye roll, and a desire to move on to a better story somewhere else.