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Virtual Book Club

THE HAPPY WOMEN'S

WILD GAME

My Mother, Her Secret, and Me

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Join us with Adrienne Brodeur, Author of: WILD GAME: My Mother, Her Secret and Me

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This  Happy Women's Virtual Book Club, for the Paperback Release of WILD GAME  (on sale July 7th) is via Zoom for 2 gatherings and moderated discussion.

Book Club Dates are Two Sunday Afternoons:


Sunday, July 19th: 4:00 pm PST

First session is a 20 minute Welcome Introduction to the group before we begin reading the book.

 

Sunday, August 16th: 4:00 pm PST

Session after we have completed WILD GAME is one hour. 

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A Zoom link will be sent to you a few days before each meeting.
This is a free event.

Entertainment Weekly 40 Biggest Books of the Season, People Magazine Best Books of the Fall, An NPR On Point’s Best Read of Fall 2019, BookPage Fall 2019 Most Anticipated Nonfiction, Vogue 1st serial excerpt, A Book of the Month Club September Pick, The Nervous Breakdown October Book Club Pick, Bookish “Kelly’s Pick” – Fall 2019

When Adrienne Brodeur turned 14 years old, her mother, Malabar told a secret that would forever change their relationship.  As Brodeur writes in her highly anticipated memoir Wild Game, 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 doomed marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later did she find the strength to embrace her life — and her mother — on her own terms.

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Brodeur, a longtime book editor who’s worked in the literary sphere for years, has generated quite the hype with her memoir. Rights were acquired by the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the seven figures, beating out 14 publishing houses. Kelly Fremon Craig, the director of Edge of Seventeen, has preemptively bought the film rights with a script already completed. 

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“There came a point in my life when it became clear that playing [my story] for laughs undermined the pain I was in and had caused others,” Brodeur tells EW. “It was then that I found a more authentic voice and decided to reckon with the truth of it head on, as a memoir.”

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.

Adrienne Brodeur Sign Up Form

Moderated by author Claire Bidwell Smith

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Claire Bidwell Smith, grief expert and internationally renowned author of  Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief and 
The Rules of Inheritance

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SIGN UP NOW!
This is a free event.
Deadline to Register is July 18th.
Invite Your Book Club & Other Friends to Join.


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Please support your local independent bookstores by purchasing WILD GAME through bookshop.org which will direct you to a bookseller close to your home. If you prefer audiobooks, please purchase via Audible.com.

Thanks for Signing Up!

Once you sign up we'll send you an email with Zoom links for the 2 Adrienne Brodeur Virtual Book Club gatherings!

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