Adrienne Brodeur
Best-selling Memoirist & Novelist
Executive Director of Aspen Words
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- An Evening with Adrienne Brodeur
Biography
“Adrienne Brodeur does family intrigue and dysfunction like no one else I know. Gorgeous, gripping.” —Ruth Ozeki
“Brodeur is very deliberately examining a small family horror story within a larger political context.” —The New York Times
Adrienne Brodeur is the best-selling author of the novel Little Monsters (Simon & Schuster, 2023), a New York Times editors choice and a Vogue best book of 2023; and the memoir Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me (Mariner Books, 2019), which The New York Times Book Review described as, “Exquisite and harrowing. The book is so gorgeously written and deeply insightful, and with a line of narrative tension that never slacks, from the first page to the last, that it’s one you’ll likely read in a single, delicious sitting.” Wild Game’s film rights were bought by Chernin Entertainment with Nick Hornby attached to adapt and Deniz Gamze Ergüven as director.
Brodeur has spent most of her professional life in the literary world, discovering voices and cultivating talent. Her publishing career began with the founding of 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 National Magazine Award for Best Fiction four times. In 2005, she became an editor at Harcourt, where she acquired and edited literary fiction and memoir.
In 2013, Brodeur left publishing 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.
Adrienne splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod, where she lives with her husband and children.
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Publications
Little Monsters
Novel, 2023
Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they have been haunted by her absence ever since. Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote home on Cape Cod, where the attachment between Ken and Abby deepened into something complicated—and as adults their relationship is strained. Now, years later, the siblings’ lives are still deeply entwined. Ken is a successful businessman with political ambitions and a picture-perfect family and Abby is a talented visual artist who depends on her brother’s goodwill, in part because he owns the studio where she lives and works.
As the novel opens, Adam is approaching his seventieth birthday, staring down his mortality and fading relevance. He has always managed his bipolar disorder with medication, but he’s determined to make one last scientific breakthrough and so he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children. Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harboring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family—Steph, who doesn’t make her connection known. As Adam grows more attuned to the frequencies of the deep sea and less so to the people around him, Ken and Abby each plan the elaborate gifts they will present to their father on his birthday, jostling for primacy in this small family unit.
Set in the fraught summer of 2016, Little Monsters is a “smart, page-flipping novel…[with] shades of Succession” (The Boston Globe) from a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out—its Edenic lushness and its snakes.
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me
Memoir, 2019
On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their lives for years to come: Ben Souther just kissed me.
Adrienne instantly became her mother’s confidante and helpmate, blossoming in the sudden light of her attention, and from then on, 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 precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life—and her mother—on her own terms.
Wild Game is a brilliant, timeless memoir about how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. It’s a remarkable story of resilience, a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• Family Politics as a Predictor of Mayhem on a Bigger Scale – New York Times
• A juicy portrait of a wealthy family on the brink of disaster – Washington Post
• Review of Little Monsters: A sensitive portrait of troubled lives – Kirkus Reviews
• A Mother’s Secrets, a Daughter’s Lies – New York Times
Listen to Audio
• How Do We Escape Family Secrets? Adrienne Brodeur on Her New Memoir – Just the Right Book
Selected Writings
• Caring for a Mother With Dementia in the Midst of the Coronavirus Crisis – Vogue
• Our Children Have My Last Name. No, My Husband Doesn’t Mind – Glamour
• Formerly Spouses, Now Step-Siblings – New York Times
