Adrienne Brodeur: On the Magic of Early Morning Writing Routines, Writer's Residencies and Her Debut Memoir, "Wild Game"
Since Adrienne Brodeur’s memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me was released in October, it’s been met with raving accolades and star reviews from some of the most influential sources in the book world, like Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Kirkus review and Time. Brodeur’s book tells the story of her teenage years spent on Cape Cod, acting as her mother, Malabar's confidante in the midst of an affair with Malabar's husband’s best friend. What begins for Adrienne as an exciting way to get closer to her mother, ends up creating disastrous 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. This is more than a memoir about an affair. Instead it explores the lies we tell ourselves, the secrets that change us, the relationship between parent and child and the resilience that can be found deep within ourselves.
I spoke with Adrienne over the phone where we discussed writing about the people we are close to, the magic of early morning writing routines, the beauty of writer’s residencies and the making of her powerful memoir, Wild Game.
Kailey Brennan: Why did you want to tell this story now? How long did it take you to write Wild Game?
Adrienne Brodeur: Well, the glib answer is either 40 years or two and a half years, depending on whether you count processing time. (Laughs) I've been thinking about it for much of my life. I started with journals and it turned into a sort of overwrought short stories. At some point, I tackled it mostly with humor, which I think is a way to deflect the kind of pain that resided underneath the story. The real game-changer for me was having children, meeting the man I wanted to spend my life with and knowing that I wanted to start a family. Although I thought I'd gotten a hold on everything, I realized that I still had a lot of work to do and the only real way to do it was to face it head-on in memoir. So, it didn't all happen on the day of their birth certainly, but over time and with exploration. I just knew that there was this legacy of deception in my family and I needed it to stop with my children. Having children just immediately causes a different relationship with your past and your future and causes revelations. So thinking of future generations made me want to write it when I did.
KB: I know that sometimes when people are close to us or still in our life, it can be difficult to write about them or create them on the page. Was it difficult for you to write about your mother? Where you ever concerned about what she would think?
AB: Oh, of course. That was on my mind all the time because I love my mother. She was complicated and we had a complicated relationship. I did talk to her about it before I wrote the book. I let her know I needed to do it in memoir—to my own surprise. I was so grateful that she understood this need and supported me in doing so. But I tried to write a very fair portrayal.
Both of my mother and our relationship. The thing I was most fearful of was writing a kind of Mommy Dearest, bad guy and good guy narrative. I just wasn't interested in that. One of my guiding lights was a line that I read in a Vivian Gornick book called The Situation and The Story. “For the drama to deepen, you must show the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent.” We all know in memoir you can't settle scores and you have to be as hard on yourself as anyone else. And I tried to follow those rules and be very honest. The truth is I think my mother did a much better job than her mother. It’s all about understanding and being able to move on.
KB: I’ve read some articles that say writing shouldn’t be cathartic, and others say that it can be. What do you think? Can writing be healing?
AB: I don't find things sit in neat little packages. (Laughs) You know, life has been cathartic. Thinking about this memoir, writing it, going out and talking to a bigger public about it has been healing and cathartic in some ways. But it's not any one thing. It's how you move through events of your life and how you choose to process them.
KB: I was curious about what being on book tour has been like—talking about these events of your life so much. I’m sure it brings back a lot of those emotions that come with holding a secret.
AB: It’s been fascinating. It's been unexpected and, the obvious things about a book tour, it's exhausting and you're running from place to place and you're seeing so many people. But the surprising thing is how much you get from these short interactions with people. When we write our books, we're alone in a room talking to ourselves and feeling a little bit crazy for the most part, at least that’s how I felt. And some people really understand what the reaction will be, but I, for one — I'm not trying to sound coy —I had no idea that people would relate to this book. It always seemed pretty quirky. Not a lot of people had been their mother's wing person on their extramarital affairs.
So I wasn't expecting a, wow, I relate so much to this book. And yet that is what I hear again and again. This sort of reaction of, it felt as if you wrote this book for me or, while my mother didn't do the same things, there were boundary issues and I wish I didn't know as much as she chose to tell me. That it's touched people and that I'm able to hear their stories and reflect on them and feel that I've been at all helpful in their own processing of events is both unexpected and wonderful. It’s the thing I've been most surprised by.
KB: You mentioned before that you kept journals. So you’ve always had an interest in writing?
AB: Both of my parents are writers. My father was a New Yorker writer, on the staff there for 50 years or so. My mother did all this food and travel writing in her career. Like most kids, I was not going to go down my parent’s path. I actually have a master's in public policy and that was the direction I thought I would pursue. In my mid-twenties, I became very close friends with a woman my father was dating and would later marry, who owned an independent bookstore in California. She started giving me books in a way that no one had ever sort of tailored them to me. It was as if she knew exactly what I needed to read. She pressed these books into my hand and I became an avid reader thanks to her. I think that was when my life sort of shifted from policy and government into the literary world. I knew I wanted to make a life in it. I didn't quite know how but it was absorbing and compelling to me. That little pile of policy journals on my bedside went down and a stack of literary journals went up. I ended up moving back to New York from California, switching careers and tried to enter the literary world. That's slightly different than becoming a writer, but they were all part of the same thing. So while I kept journals since I was 13 and was writing short stories and essays and other things, I didn't fully embrace the writer in me for a long while.
KB: I love learning about people who switch careers like that. We think we need to know what we're supposed to do at a very young age, you know?
AB: Absolutely. Plus we all are working for such a long period of our lives now that we're living longer so how is anyone supposed to get it right at 21 or 22? And there is this idea that we can't have multiple careers during our lifetime. I mean, there are a lot of fascinating things out there.
KB: Can you tell me what your writing routine looks like?
AB: At the time I started thinking about and writing this book, I had two young children, a marriage, a big job that I loved at Aspen Words, which is the literary nonprofit. So in a nutshell, I was very busy. But I kept coming back to wanting to write. I had started to draft a chapter or two when I had the good fortune of being accepted into a residency, which I'd never done before.
So I got through the guilt of leaving my family and went for three weeks to Hedge Brook, which is an Island off Whidbey Island, off of Seattle, Washington. That is where I got a toehold. You were just absolutely nothing but a writer on that island. None of us were focused on our families or our job or the rest of our lives. You were just with seven women and you were writing and talking about writing. You had these beautiful little cabins where you were working and so on. When I got back, of course, my thought bubble was well someday, in another 10 years, I might have a nice block of writing time where I can do the next two chapters.
It did not occur to me how to keep it moving forward. And then a writer friend of mine gave me the advice that I need to touch it every day. And I remember my thought bubble was practically hostile because this, of course, was a person who didn't have a conventional job and didn't have children. And I just was like, yeah, as if I could write every day.
But then I did start doing it. So if I used to wake up at 6:45 to get my children ready for school, I started waking up at 6:00 and then at 5:30 and then 5:00. Finally at 4:30, which I found was the sweet spot. I feel like if there's any secret gift I can give to any other writer — those pre-dawn hours are magical. You can’t even start to think about your to-do list. It just doesn't exist for you. Nothing compels you to go up and down any internet rabbit holes. You're sort of close to your subconscious. You're with the page. It’s just the most spectacular writing time and absolutely no one is expecting anything of you between 4:30 AM and 6:30 AM. I found it amazing.
KB: Wow. Do you have any other advice for aspiring writers or writers tackling memoir?
AB: Writing daily is key because when you start doing that, suddenly everything you've processed all day long, whether it's a song you hear or a conversation you overhear or something someone says to you, it all goes through the lens of your book somehow. It's like you're hyper-conscious of it. So I think that is hugely helpful. More long term — read as if your career depends on it because it does. You have to read and understand how people who have done what you're trying to do have done that really well. The structure of books and how plots unfold is so helpful. Even if you're not consciously taking notes or imitating or anything like that, it's about absorbing enough books. Mary Oliver has this famous line, “Writing has to be a courtship. And if you should show up every day, it learns to trust you.” I really think that's part of it too. You get in this routine like the way people who exercise regularly —which I can dimly recall doing once in my life— how your body just wants to go out for that run. Now I feel like my body wants to write in the morning. It wants to engage with the subconscious in that way.
Adrienne Brodeur is an award-winning editor and author with 20 years of writing, editing and publishing experience. Her memoir “Wild Game” will be published by HMH Books on October 15, 2019 and is in development for film.
