Family Matters: Three Memoirs

Adrienne Brodeur began her career in publishing as the co-founder, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of the National Magazine Award-winning Zoetrope: All-Story. She has worked as a book editor and is currently the executive director of Aspen Words. Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is a daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity. 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. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life—and her mother—on her own terms.

Elissa Altman is the critically acclaimed author of Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking and Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw. Her work has appeared in O: The Oprah Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The New York Times, Tin House, and The Washington Post, among other places. Altman has taught the craft of memoir at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Loft Literary Center, 1440 Multiversity, and Ireland’s Literature and Larder program. Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing (Ballantine Books) is her latest book. After surviving a traumatic childhood in nineteen-seventies New York and young adulthood living in the shadow of her flamboyant mother, Rita, a makeup-addicted former television singer, Elissa Altman has managed to build a very different life, settling in Connecticut with her wife of nearly twenty years. Then Elissa is confronted with the unthinkable: Rita, suffers an incapacitating fall, leaving her completely dependent upon her daughter. To sustain their fragile mother-daughter bond, Elissa must navigate the turbulent waters of their shared lives, the practical challenges of caregiving for someone who refuses to accept it, the tentacles of narcissism, and the mutual, frenetic obsession that has defined their relationship. Motherland is a story that touches every home and every life, mapping the ferocity of maternal love, moral obligation, the choices women make about motherhood, and the possibility of healing.

Kristin Kovacic was born and lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she has taught for twenty years, currently at Winchester Thurston School. Her essays have won the Pushcart Prize and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, among other awards, and have appeared in Brain, Child, Full Grown People, and other publications. She is the co-editor of Birth: A Literary Companion and the author of the poetry chapbook, House of Women. In her latest book, History of My Breath (Red Mountain), Kovacic attempts to trap the fugitive knowledge of the durable adventures--childhood, marriage, childbirth, parenting. In personal essays spanning thirty years of breathing and brooding, Kovacic explores the intersections of love and pain that release the surprising lessons of family life, a life lived, as she calls it, "abundantly accompanied." What are the wages for the work of love? What costs? How do you navigate the radical proximity of others--of children, spouses, friends, parents--without blurring the fragile outline of the self? With wonder, candor, and a sidelong eye, Kristin Kovacic breathes new life into some of the world's oldest subjects.