The Michelle Smith Arts & Culture Series: A Conversation with Adrienne Brodeur
Join us to hear Adrienne Brodeur discuss her much anticipated memoir WILD GAME: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, just released this October. Moderated by Erika Mallin, Executive Director, Aspen Institute Arts Program.
“It’s a rare memoir that reads like a thriller, but Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game manages to do just that. Beautifully written and harrowing, the book left me breathless.”
— Richard Russo
Livestream:
About the Book:
WILD GAME: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me is a daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity. When Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words: Ben Souther just kissed me. Adrienne instantly became her mother’s confidante and helpmate, and Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help orchestrate what would become an epic affair with her husband’s closest friend. There were calamitous consequences for everyone involved, impacting Adrienne’s life in profound ways. WILD GAME is a story of resilience and a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us.
Adrienne Brodeur’s publishing career began with founding the fiction magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, where she served as editor in chief from 1996-2002. The magazine has won the prestigious National Magazine Award for best fiction four times. In 2005, she became an editor at Harcourt (later, HMH Books), where she acquired and edited literary fiction and memoir. Adrienne left publishing in 2013 to become Creative Director — and later Executive Director — of Aspen Words, a literary arts nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. In 2017, she launched the Aspen Words Literary Prize, a $35,000 annual award for an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture.