Citing such award-winning authors as Joan Didion and Mary Karr and poets like Tracy K. Smith David Canfield and the late Mary Oliver as inspirations, Brodeur says writing Wild Game helped her come to terms with what happened between her and her mother. “Even though my mother’s narcissism has been a destructive force in my life, I’ve always felt deeply compassionate toward her. In my childhood, it was normal to put her needs before my own and protect her secrets,” she says. “Lightbulbs went off

in my head as I entered adulthood, but it wasn’t until I became a mother myself, holding my own daughter in my arms, that I understood the depth of my mother’s betrayal and its profound impact on my life. Writing Wild Game allowed connections to emerge, lighting up the order of happenings and enabling me to make sense of how I became me. It also helped me to forgive her.”

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Adrienne Brodeur has an illustrious literary background: she co-founded (with Francis Ford Coppola) and edited the National Magazine Award-winning Zoetrope: All-Story; has served as a judge for the National Book Awards and the National Magazine Award; was an editor at HMH for many years; and currently directs Aspen Words, which bequeaths an annual award of $35,000 for an influential work of fiction. Her father was a veteran New Yorker writer, and her mother was a food and travel writer who published several cookbooks and wrote for the New York Times, among others.