Kapitel 1
A Mother's Secret Becomes Her Daughter's Burden
In the summer of 1980, on a quiet evening in Cape Cod, fourteen-year-old Adrienne Brodeur's life changed forever when her mother, Malabar, woke her with an extraordinary confession: "Ben Souther just kissed me." This wasn't just any kiss-Ben was her stepfather's best friend, and both were married to other people. What followed was a decade-long entanglement where Adrienne became her mother's confidante and accomplice, a role that would shape her identity and relationships for decades to come. "Wild Game" has captivated readers since its 2019 release, earning praise from Oprah's Book Club and becoming a New York Times Editors' Choice. This memoir explores the complex dance between mothers and daughters, examining how the secrets we keep for others can ultimately imprison ourselves. As Dani Shapiro noted, it's "a daughter's tale of the mother she adored, but never fully knew."
Kapitel 2
The Beginning of a Dangerous Complicity
On that fateful July evening in 1980, Ben Souther arrived at the Cape Cod beach house bearing a gift of freshly killed squabs for Malabar, who received them with delight rather than disgust. At fourteen, Adrienne watched from the periphery as her mother transformed into a culinary sorceress in their panoramic kitchen overlooking Nauset Harbor. Unlike a conventional homemaker, Malabar was an artist who rarely followed recipes, wielding knives and spices with a power that seemed to entice men to their doom.
The evening progressed with cocktails and a magnificent dinner featuring soft-shell clams and perfectly roasted squabs. When Ben declared it "perfection" while resting his arm on the back of Malabar's chair, something shifted in the atmosphere. The next morning, Adrienne found herself thrust into a new role when her mother pulled her into hidden corners of the house to confess her unhappiness in her marriage to Charles, who had suffered debilitating strokes. "Charles has been more child than husband," Malabar confided.
Adrienne orchestrated a clamming expedition, deliberately creating an opportunity for her mother and Ben to be alone. When she returned later, she observed them with their heads together, whispering intimately. The slight tilt of her mother's head made it clear they'd decided to proceed with their affair-"as casually and permanently as if they had tossed a stone into the ocean." From that moment forward, Adrienne became the keeper of her mother's secret, a role that would define their relationship for years to come.
What began as a daughter's desire to see her mother happy quickly evolved into a complex web of deception. Adrienne became skilled at creating alibis, making excuses for her mother's absences, and ensuring Charles remained oblivious. The boundary between mother and daughter blurred dangerously, with Adrienne feeling that her primary purpose was to facilitate her mother's happiness, regardless of the moral cost.
Kapitel 3
A Family Built on Shifting Sands
The affair didn't emerge from nowhere but from a family history already marked by instability and reinvention. Following her parents' divorce when Adrienne was five, she and her brother Peter were uprooted from their modest Manhattan apartment to the sprawling Greenwood estate in Chestnut Hill when Malabar married Charles. Suddenly, they had four stepsiblings and seventeen bedrooms in a mansion they called "100 Essex."
While Malabar flourished in this grand setting, Adrienne and Peter shuttled between this opulence and their father's bare-bones cabin in Connecticut on alternate weekends. The prevailing wisdom that children were resilient creatures who fared better with happy parents was contradicted by the vacant-eyed expressions in their childhood photographs from this period.
Malabar herself came from troubled origins-the dramatic only child of twice-married, twice-divorced alcoholic parents. Her first memory was disturbingly of her father's penis when she was three. She obsessed over an Indian gemstone necklace from her parents' doomed relationship, which seemed to symbolize the life of luxury and passion she believed she deserved.
Before Adrienne was born, her parents had lost their firstborn son Christopher to choking. Adrienne arrived on his birthday, forever feeling like a replacement child living in his shadow. Malabar would often show Adrienne her precious Indian necklace, making her promise never to sell it and declaring that Adrienne would wear it on her wedding day-a promise that would later take on painful significance.
The Cape Cod summers provided a stark contrast to their school-year existence in the impersonal mansion of 100 Essex. With fifteen bedrooms spread so far apart that family connections felt impossible, and the house perpetually on the market, there was a constant sense of impermanence. Charles worked at his family's investment firm while Peter and Adrienne attended different prep schools. Every evening, Malabar and Charles began their elaborate cocktail ritual while the children ate separately.
After 1980, Malabar's affair consumed her completely. "I've never felt so alive," she'd confide to Adrienne during their monthly henna treatments. They developed elaborate alibis using Malabar's stepmother Julia's alcoholism as cover. Despite Adrienne's worries about discovery, Malabar assured her, "No one will ever find out. We're being very careful, Rennie. Plus, we have you, our secret weapon."
Kapitel 4
The Wild Game Cookbook: A Perfect Cover
As the affair continued, Malabar and Ben created an ingenious cover story-they would collaborate on a wild game cookbook. This pretext allowed them to spend countless hours together without arousing suspicion. Their Cape Cod home became the center of wild-game cooking experiments, with Ben arriving bearing unusual offerings like frogs or roadkill squirrel alongside more conventional dinner ingredients.
Malabar kept her Dutch oven constantly simmering with various game meats, while she and Ben would disappear together on flimsy pretexts like "finding charcoal" in the basement, taking suspiciously long times to return. Adrienne would vigilantly check her mother for mussed hair or disheveled clothing upon her return, sometimes straightening her appearance despite Malabar's annoyance.
The clues to the affair were everywhere, yet Charles and Ben's wife Lily remained oblivious, genuinely supporting the cookbook project. Meanwhile, Malabar coped with her unfulfillment by wrapping herself in alcohol, making extra-strong Manhattans to dull her pain as she circled endlessly around the life she truly wanted.
Malabar also cultivated a relationship with Lily, using Charles and Ben's friendship as cover. She would praise Lily's immaculate English-style gardens while privately dismissing them as lacking creativity. "Ben is like a wild animal," she would tell Adrienne. "The man needs a jungle." She also took interest in Ben and Lily's adult children, Jack and Hannah, studying the leather-bound diaries Lily had kept of their childhoods.
Most shocking to Malabar were the Southers' extensive travels-trips to China, India, the Galapagos, throughout Europe, Africa, and America. She was appalled that Lily would leave her children for weeks or months while "gallivanting" with Ben. "What kind of mother could leave her children for so long?" she'd ask Adrienne. "It's monstrous." The irony of this judgment would only become apparent to Adrienne years later.
Kapitel 5
Seeking Escape While Remaining Tethered
At seventeen, three years into her role as her mother's confidante and accomplice, Adrienne desperately needed escape. When her boyfriend Adam suggested her family situation was inappropriate, she defended her mother fiercely. After their argument, he offered a peace offering of papaya, and they agreed to forget the conversation. With Adam, Adrienne experienced moments of peace she'd never known before.
Adam joined her for six months traveling across America. Though she portrayed them as intrepid explorers in postcards home, her journals revealed the truth: they were aimless, courting danger in highway motels and sketchy bars. Despite the physical distance, she remained emotionally tethered to her mother through their Sunday calls. Malabar's affair still thrilled her more than her own adventures-she lived for being her accomplice, her getaway driver.
During these calls, Malabar shared close calls, like Ben kissing her in the pantry when Lily nearly caught them, and confessed her growing impatience waiting for their spouses to die. Charles had a brain aneurysm they were monitoring secretly, but no one's death seemed imminent. Malabar pleaded for Adrienne's return, reminding her "we are two halves of one whole."
When Adrienne returned home at eighteen after her year away, she fell into her mother's arms, their bodies fitting together perfectly. Malabar confessed her growing desperation after four years of waiting for Ben, and Adrienne reassured her they deserved each other. To Adrienne's alarm, Malabar had shared her secret with numerous friends while she was gone, expanding the circle of confidants dangerously.
The family had changed during her absence. Charles and Malabar had moved to a Beacon Hill townhouse with an elevator to accommodate his declining health. His undiagnosed brain aneurysm remained a looming threat. Malabar hired Hazel, a caregiver she described as "dreary," to help with Charles, giving herself freedom to see Ben.
Kapitel 6
The Blackmail Plot and a Moral Line Crossed
When Adrienne began college at Columbia in fall 1984, she was determined to create a new identity, to find distance from the girl so entangled with her mother. But less than a month into her freshman year, Malabar called in tears. Hazel, Charles's caregiver, had discovered her affair with Ben and was blackmailing her for $10,000.
Adrienne's adrenaline surged with that familiar buzz as she tried to calm her mother. "What evidence does she have?" she asked. Malabar was hysterical: "If I don't pay, she'll tell Charles and Lily everything." Then came the words that stung Adrienne: "Ben is everything to me. My life isn't worth living if I lose him."
After searching the apartment, Malabar found a hidden file containing hotel stationery, matchbooks, ticket stubs, a love note signed with initials, and six explicit Polaroids-a complete dossier of their affair. Together, they devised an elaborate scheme: Malabar would tell Hazel she needed a week to get the money. Meanwhile, posing as Hazel, she would send letters to married friends in Lily's circle, including Ben's sisters, falsely accusing Malabar of affairs with their husbands.
Each letter contained deliberately refutable details that would undermine Hazel's credibility. When the inevitable calls came in, Malabar would express shock, claim she'd already fired Hazel, and ask each friend to warn Lily about potential similar letters-ensuring that if Hazel approached Lily with the truth, it would be dismissed as another fabrication.
The scheme worked, but Adrienne felt she'd crossed a moral line. She'd moved from accomplice to director of deception. Though initially intoxicated by their praise-"You were brilliant," her mother gushed; "A chip off the old block!" Ben toasted-the high quickly faded. This lie weighed differently on her conscience. She wrote self-loathing journal entries and stared at her reflection until she no longer recognized herself.
Kapitel 7
Death, Guilt, and New Beginnings
Charles's health continued to deteriorate, with his brain aneurysm growing critically. Surgery offered a 50/50 chance of survival; without it, he would certainly die when it ruptured. Most disturbing, the doctors advised against telling Charles, and Malabar agreed. "What good would come of it?" she reasoned. The surgery was scheduled for fall, allowing Charles "a beautiful summer" without fear.
That summer of 1985, Charles was unexpectedly happy. His long-dismissed belief about the location of the pirate ship Whydah had been validated when archaeologist Barry Clifford discovered the wreck near their house. All summer, Charles delighted in news reports of the treasure and shared Whydah facts with renewed enthusiasm.
Before returning to New York, Charles and Adrienne made a pact to search beaches together next summer for Whydah relics. On the day of his surgery, Adrienne waited anxiously until her mother called: "He made it. The doctor repaired the aneurysm."
But just days after his surgery, Charles suffered a massive stroke and died alone in his hospital room. Malabar was with Ben at the time. When Adrienne arrived in Boston, she found Malabar weeping harder than she'd ever seen, her emotional defenses completely shattered by guilt and grief. "He didn't deserve to die alone," she sobbed. "Charles was so good to me, Rennie. And look at how I treated him. I gave him the worst of me."
Less than two weeks after Charles's death, salvagers confirmed the Whydah's identity by uncovering its bronze bell inscribed "THE WHYDAH GALLY 1716." Adrienne wept that Charles hadn't lived to see this proof of the pirate ship he'd wondered about for years.
Kapitel 8
Love Across Generations: A Twisted Family Tree
During a vacation in Harbour Island, Adrienne met Jack, Ben's son, and they began a flirtation that quickly developed into something more. Without thinking of her boyfriend Hank, she kissed Jack on the beach under starlight. Looking back thirty years later, she questioned her motives-she'd never been so forward before. Jack and she spent just two days together before Hank arrived, but in that time they built the foundation of their relationship, adding a new dimension to their parents' love triangle.
After the Bahamas vacation, Adrienne ended things with Hank and began dating Jack in secret. Neither wanted to involve their parents until they were surer of their feelings, but Adrienne also kept another secret-she never told Jack that their parents were having an affair.
Their parents soon discovered their relationship. Ben pieced it together after Jack mentioned dating someone in New York, and Malabar was utterly delighted-as if their romance confirmed the rightness of her love for Ben. At twenty-one, Adrienne never questioned why she was prioritizing her mother's secret over her boyfriend's trust.
After graduating from Columbia, Adrienne moved to San Diego to live with Jack. While there, her father built a new life there too, falling in love with a woman named Margot who owned a bookstore. Margot became Adrienne's confidante, asking probing questions and listening fully to her answers-something she wasn't accustomed to. Margot introduced her to literature, pressing books into her hands and telling her, "You can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself."
When Adrienne told her friend Kyra that she'd finally put healthy distance between herself and Malabar, Kyra laughed and pointed out she was living with Ben's son. Adrienne insisted the two were unrelated, but privately struggled with the secret she kept from Jack.
Kapitel 9
The Revelation That Shattered Everything
The call that shattered everything came on a Sunday morning in February. Jack and Adrienne were still in bed discussing their wedding plans for July when his mother Lily called, clearly distraught. Then Ben got on the line, and Adrienne immediately recognized this was the moment she'd dreaded for a decade-the affair had been discovered.
She watched in horror as Jack listened to his father confessing to the "terrible mistake" and "betrayal" of his affair with Malabar. Ben was pleading for forgiveness, sounding desperate and broken-nothing like the confident man she knew. Most devastatingly, he promised Jack he would never see or speak to Malabar again, an impossible vow given their impending marriage.
When Jack hung up, he turned to Adrienne and confirmed what he already suspected-she had known about the affair all along. Though she tried to explain she'd been only fourteen when it started, Jack absolved her of blame, placing it squarely on their parents. "Two of the most unbelievably self-centered people I've ever known," he said, pointing out that Charles had been his godfather and his father's best friend.
Despite the revelation, Jack and Adrienne proceeded with their wedding plans. When they visited the Southers in Plymouth, Adrienne felt Lily's anguish like a physical blow. Lily appeared thin and brittle, but with a new fierceness. When she saw Jack, her face softened, but her look at Adrienne made clear that Jack had been hers before he was Adrienne's.
During a tense lobster dinner, Ben offered a broad, obligatory apology that felt more performed than felt. Lily began discussing wedding logistics, clearly trying to ensure she and Ben would be kept far from Malabar. When Adrienne mentioned dancing at the reception, Lily declared firmly, "There will be no dance."
Kapitel 10
A Wedding and Its Aftermath
Adrienne's wedding day arrived with perfect Cape Cod weather. As she prepared in her childhood bedroom, she was overcome with dizziness, remembering when her mother first made her her confidante ten years earlier. Days before, she'd written in her journal: "Would my marriage to Jack suffer for having been based on a lie?"
During the reception, Malabar underwent a transformation, removing her modest jacket and gloves to reveal bare shoulders adorned with brilliant rubies, emeralds, and diamonds-the most dazzling woman in sight. The inevitable moment arrived when Ben and Malabar danced together, their cheeks pressed close, whispering words only they could hear, faces aglow with happiness in their fleeting moment together.
After the wedding, Adrienne fell into a deep depression that lasted for years. She felt strangely listless, her emotions dimmed, colors dulled, thoughts unclear. Jack attributed it to post-wedding exhaustion, but she sensed something deeper. On their last night of their honeymoon, she had a nightmare about her brother Christopher, ending with her failing her mother.
Back in San Diego, this emotional numbness expanded like a moody weather system. While marriage had given Jack security and a clear path forward, Adrienne found herself questioning whether his dependability was truly what she was seeking. Her mental state deteriorated over two years. She woke nightly at 2 a.m., tormented by voices calling her fraud, liar, fool.
In November 1992, Lily died of a heart attack. When Malabar called, Adrienne detected her barely contained hope-Ben might finally be hers. At Lily's funeral, she witnessed Ben's swift transition from grieving husband to liberated lover.
Kapitel 11
Breaking Free and Finding Herself
Malabar and Ben shocked everyone by moving in together just two months after Lily's death and announcing their intention to marry. Despite objections from Jack, Hannah, and Adrienne, they wed in September, barely nine months after Lily died. Jack joked darkly about their new family dynamic: Malabar was now his stepmother, Ben his father-in-law and Adrienne's stepfather, and Jack was Adrienne's stepbrother.
Adrienne's depression worsened despite therapy and medication. After a suicidal episode where she held Jack's gun while lying in their empty bathtub, she decided to move to New York to pursue a literary career while attempting a long-distance marriage with Jack.
In New York, she felt an immediate sense of homecoming. During Malabar's first visit to her apartment, over increasingly strong cocktails, she delivered a devastating message: "Has it ever occurred to you, Rennie, that I don't want you anywhere near me?"
This insult cut deeper than any physical blow could have. Adrienne realized her mother no longer needed her now that she had Ben, her hard-won prize. For the next decade, they spoke infrequently. Though painful, this separation was overdue-her therapist was right that she should have broken free in adolescence.
Adrienne rebuilt her life through writing, obsessive reading, and most importantly, friendships. In 1995, at thirty, she met Francis Ford Coppola and launched Zoetrope: All-Story magazine with him. Meanwhile, she and Jack drifted apart and eventually divorced in 1997.
After her divorce, Adrienne dated extensively, drawn to men from dysfunctional backgrounds. Then in 2002, she met Nick Keane on a blind date. His stable, happy childhood seemed utterly foreign to her-Catholic upbringing, loving parents, five siblings he got along with. Though divorced with two sons, Nick was warm and kind.
Kapitel 12
Breaking the Chain of Maternal Legacy
Romance without drama was a revelation to Adrienne. With Nick, she experienced both intense passion and deep attachment-a stark contrast to the relationships she'd known before. They married in 2005, and when she gave birth to her daughter at thirty-nine, the world shifted profoundly. Holding her triggered emotions she'd never experienced, along with fears about keeping her safe.
When Malabar arrived to meet her granddaughter, Adrienne broke down in a panic attack, overwhelmed by the realization that she was now a mother herself while still yearning to be mothered by Malabar. In that moment, she had a vision of generations toppling like dominoes-her ancestors pushing toward her and her newborn. She recognized the toxic inheritance in their matrilineal line and faced a choice: continue down the familiar path or find a new one for her daughter's sake.
Life brought a series of losses: Ben suffered a stroke in 2013 and died at nearly ninety-five; Margot, diagnosed with ALS, chose to end her life two months after Ben's passing. Most shocking was Malabar's mental decline. After Ben's death, she offered Adrienne the family necklace but became oddly possessive when she tried to take it.
A year into widowhood, Malabar was diagnosed with aggressive melanoma. Driving her home from the hospital, Adrienne asked what she was thinking about. "Christopher," she replied. "I was just wondering if my mother was looking after him."
When Adrienne tried to connect with her about her mother, Malabar admitted, "I know my mother loved me, but not so much as she loved herself." This gave Adrienne courage to tell her she felt the same way about her. Instead of apologizing, Malabar shocked her by demanding her necklace back, claiming her long-dead mother was furious she'd given it away.
Despite her anger, Adrienne helped her frail mother home, where Malabar told her she loved her "more than anything else in the world." Adrienne knew her mother loved her as much as she could love anyone. Returning to her family, she embraced her husband and children, realizing she'd broken the chain. She was still Malabar's daughter, but she'd escaped her hold-every time she failed to become more like her mother, she became more like herself.
At fifty-three, Adrienne had devoted as many years to uncovering her mother's secrets as she spent hiding them. Though Malabar now had dementia and couldn't help her find answers, she smiled when Adrienne read her the parts of her story where she was powerful and got what she wanted.
Adrienne's daughter was now almost fourteen-the age she was when her mother woke her to tell her about Ben's kiss. Though they looked alike, her daughter was fully herself with a ready laugh and bright singing voice neither her grandmother nor Adrienne possessed. Most importantly, when her daughter was confused by an English assignment asking her to write about overcoming a challenge when adults were unavailable or unsupportive, her bewilderment at such a concept-her inability to imagine parents who weren't there for her-brought tears to Adrienne's eyes, confirming that she had indeed broken the cycle.
