Amazon blurb:
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.
I recently picked up a used copy of Adrienne Brodeur’s 2019 memoir because I want to understand the psychology behind this—why a mother would inflict this kind of boundary crossing on her own child, and why the daughter would choose to participate in the deception. Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me provided those painful answers, mapping out the severe psychological price tag of a parent crossing familial boundaries.
Reading Adrienne Brodeur’s memoir felt entirely too familiar. Years ago, when my H's affair tore through our family and imploded our old marriage, I discovered another hidden, quiet casualty of the wreckage: my H's AP had made her young adult daughter her intimate confidante and affair co-conspirator. By turning her daughter into an intimate confidante during the affair, that mother stripped away a crucial boundary between parent and child. Your child should NOT be your intimate confidante. And, when the person who brought you into this life teaches you that intimacy is built on secrecy and deception, it warps your blueprint for what love is supposed to be - not only romantic love but familial love as well.
Adrienne Brodeur’s well written memoir mirrors the reality I witnessed in many ways. While Adrienne was an adolescent who eagerly craved her mother's spotlight, H's AP manipulated this role onto a daughter who was already trying to step into her own adult identity. Both situations resulted in a profound form of emotional neglect wrapped up in a false sense of closeness. AP's daughter was handed a legacy of anxiety and deep trust issues before she even had a chance to build her own adult life. To me, one of the deepest heartbreaks was that the daughter lost her safety net; she learned that her mother was too self-centered and needy to truly support HER. Instead of being free to focus on her own future, her own career, and her own early relationships, she was burdened with the heavy weight of her mother’s manipulation—forced to act as the parent/best friend to the very person who should have been protecting her.
Ultimately, Wild Game is a harrowing look at what happens when a parent is too volatile or selfish to protect their own child. For any BS navigating the complex aftermath of an affair's effect on the family, Adrienne Brodeur’s memoir is a validating resource. This is particularly true when your partner or the AP compromised a child's well-being by forcing them into the role of an intimate confidante or secret keeper. For any BS navigating this specific, painful type of trauma, Wild Game is an essential, recommended read. It deconstructs the "false closeness" weaponized by manipulative (or narcissistic) parents, exposing how a child's natural desire for parental love can be used to blindside them into compliance.
As BS, our initial instinct may be to feel anger toward anyone associated with the betrayal. As the BS, sitting amidst the painful wreckage of H's betrayal while struggling to support my own young adult daughter as she navigated her father's perfidy, my heart still broke for that other daughter. It was entirely possible to feel deep anger toward the people who caused the affair, while simultaneously holding compassion for BOTH young daughters caught in its wake. Even though AP's daughter was not a child, even though she actively participated in my betrayal, given time, I saw her not as an extension of the betrayal, but as another victim of it. She deserved a mother who shielded her from adult dysfunction, not one who used her to survive it.
By detailing her own painful, decades-long journey to untangle herself, Adrienne shifts the narrative from blame to understanding. Wild Game provides a vital, firsthand look at the psychological mechanics of parental manipulation. She shows that the child was not a willing participant in the betrayal, but rather a victim of a powerful, destructive family dynamic that held sway over her even as she grew up, married and became a mother herself. Reading Wild Game was also a reminder that the ripple effects of infidelity run deep, and those who didn't choose the chaos sometimes carry the deepest scars.
[This message edited by BoundaryBuilder at 4:40 AM, Thursday, September 3rd]
