EW reviews two of this fall’s buzziest memoirs
Wild Game, by Adrienne Brodeur
Adrienne Brodeur can construct a scene with the best of them.
Her debut memoir, a smart if unsubtle chronicle of devastating family secrets, opens on Adrienne at 14, summering at her familys cozy Cape Cod beach house.
Over the course of a bougie dinner party, she feasts on squab, endures an unsettling first sexual encounter, and takes on an enormous emotional burden: Her mother tells her shes embarking on an affair with her husbands best friend.
Credit: Graywolf Press; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Adrienne is tasked to maintain the deception as she comes of age, anchoring a memoir that richly explores a complex mother-daughter bond.B+David Canfield
In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado
If there are no new stories, only new ways to tell them, Carmen Maria Machado has found a way to do exactly that, ingeniously, inDream House a book that manages to break open nearly everything we think we know about abuse memoirs.
Each brief chapter is refracted through the prism of familiar pop culture touchstones: bad romance as soap opera, as stoner comedy, as deja vu.
In her quest to make sense of a lover who turns on her, Machado ricochets from queer-theory footnotes toFinding Nemo; the result is a gorgeously kaleidoscopic feat not just of literature but of pure, uncut humanity.ALeah Greenblatt
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