How Do We Ultimately Escape Our Family Secrets?

Somehow we all want to be the favorite child. The one the parent can count out. But what happens when that ties you to secrets, to generational pain? What about when that is a trap, and how do you ultimately escape?

In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Adrienne Broudeur joins Roxanne Coady to discuss her new book, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, out now from HMH.

From the episode:

Roxanne Coady: How would a 14-year-old process the affair?

Adrienne Brodeur: It’s funny because in hindsight obviously I’m very clear how much of a burden it was and how negatively it affected my life, but the truth is at 14 it was nothing but thrilling. Most children—and I was no exception—you want to feel your mother’s love. I felt like I was in the high beams of her affection. She was showering with her need and involvement. It was completely thrilling to be part of it. This was grown-up stuff. I felt important.

I think it was significant that it was my step-father and not my father. It wouldn’t have gone as well. I was delighted that she was finally happy. She was unhappy for so long. I was delighted to be her confidant. It was all very fun, until it wasn’t.

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Roxanne: How did you manage in keeping this secret, and what does this secret begin to do to shape you?

Adrienne: How any secret shapes us kind of keeps you from being known. It keeps you from having completely intimate relationships because of course you’re not telling the whole truth. My friends would not know why I was the person who left the party early because it was my job to come home after these test dinners my parents had with the Southers, and I was the teenage chaperone who would very innocently suggest that we go on a walk. Neither spouses would join because they were in ill-health, and off we would go.

It started there, and I was all in. Things became more complicated for me when my step-father died, which happened when I was in college. That was the first time I felt guilt. I felt terrible. … Each stage, different things folded into it, and it became more and more complicated because of course it started affected more parts of my life.

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Adrienne: One of the real moments when I started to really understand is that I sank into an incredible depression in my twenties. I had never been depressed before, and I haven’t since. It was just this sudden collision of emotion, and I had never experienced anything like it. I went into therapy, and I was trying to mine what was happening to me. At the same time, I had started to become a reader thanks to my father’s third wife, who owned an independent book store, and she kept handing me these novels. All of a sudden becoming a voracious reader, I remember just this feeing … reading is such an empathetic act. You’re putting yourself in someone else’s predicament, and seeing how all these characters, who had very complicated lives as a rule, were making sense of them for themselves.

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Adrienne: What I will say about forgiving is that before I had been through this process I thought it was this magnanimous thing you do for someone else. In fact, forgiveness is very self-empowering. I did not forgive my mother, to put a blanket over these transgression and forget that it didn’t happen. I did it to let go … so I could move on. I’ve written this memoir about this affair and this part of our life You’re seeing a slim version. My mother was a tough cookie, but she did have some good moments. I don’t know … she’s my mom.

Roxanne: But at some point, you made the decision to tell this story.

Adrienne: I was noodling around this my whole life. … Then I entered this literary world, and I was thinking for a long time how to portray it. … Honestly, the game changer was starting a family of my own. That was the moment I thought, you still have work to do. You’re not there yet. For so long you can put the blinders on, march forward, and not think about the past, but the past is always with it. … The only way for me to have moved on, and to reckon with this since I did not want to pass this legacy of duplicity, was to fully face it.

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Adrienne Brodeur began her career in publishing as the co-founder, along with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of the fiction magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, which won the National Magazine Award for Best Fiction three times and launched the careers of many writers. She was a book editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for many years and, currently, she is the Executive Director of Aspen Words, a program of the Aspen Institute. She has published essays in the New York Times. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod with her husband and children.

Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.