Wild Game

I noticed how his gaze kept returning to my mother throughout the meal. My mother seemed to delight in these glances, giving equine tosses of her head and laughing readily.

I didn’t know much about this memoir when I picked it up. It started off by describing the author’s 14-year-old self in a straight-forward and unabashed way, closely to coming off as boring, before the author weighed in with this:

“Rennie, wake up. Please wake up.”

Just go away, I thought.

“Sweetheart. Please. I need you.”

At this, I opened my eyes. Malabar was in her nightgown, her hair mussed. I sat up.

“Mom, what’s wrong? Is everything okay?”

“Ben Souther just kissed me.”

I took in this information. Tried to make sense of it. Couldn’t. I rubbed my eyes. My mother was still there beside me.

“Ben kissed me,” my mother repeated.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing boring about this book. The author—or her editor—has a keen sense where cutting away chaff is concerned. I almost wish that I’d have access to the initial draft of this book, as the author’s style and sense of keeping things curt is both noteworthy and desirable; I wish more writers had the author’s good sense (and, possibly, editor).

“He wants me to meet him in New York next week. He has a board meeting—some salmon thing—and Lily plans to stay in Plymouth. I don’t know what to do.”

We were lying on our backs, heat emanating from our bodies.

“What do you think I should do?”

We both knew this was a rhetorical question. Malabar was a planner. She had already made up her mind.

“I’m going to need your help, sweetie,” she said. “I need to figure out how to do this. How to make this possible.”

I lay as still as a corpse, unsure of what to say.

That a mother decides that her infidelity is something brilliant to confide in her 14-year-old daughter is incomprehensible to all; that’s not the interesting bit, though. To me, it’s both how this affects the author’s relationship with her close family and how it affects her growing up.

This book is written by a grown woman in her fifties. She’s able to look back over life with both aplomb and integrity and simultaneously evoke both the horrors and closeness that her mother’s immediate unveiling of her infidelity brings.

More than one time during my reading of this book did I feel disgusted and angry at a parent who’d unloaded a horrendous thing like that onto one of her children.

Still, the author doesn’t handle that as Donald Trump would; she reports it almost as stoically as a child would at that time; just as she did as a child, I suppose. There are analysis and straightforward telling of the facts that made me feel they were straight from the mind of her childish id.

To cover for Malabar’s affair, I would tell Charles one thing, my father and Peter another, my friends something else, attempting to explain either my mother’s absences or my own.

All families have secrets. When your mother is self-oriented almost ad infinitum is a larger-than-life character, and only wants you to confide in while cheating on her husband, everything becomes something that the secrets converge on.

“Ben is like a wild animal,” my mother said in a way that made me understand that we’d left the topic of gardening.

“The man needs a jungle.”

The book is not only about the author’s mother; it’s also about her realising herself, becoming an individual in her own right while developing her own life, and then, as we all do, circle into her mother and father as we all do. The book displays this in a near-Ingmar Bergman state of affairs without turning overly dramatic.

I won’t say more about what goes on in this book, but I will strongly recommend it. The language is that of a seasoned writer who has turned over this, the story of herself and her family, for a long time before delivering it to the public in book form.

This is a laudable effort and deserves to be read by everybody who likes memoirs, especially well-written ones. It’s cathartic about the overt and slowly and elegantly reveals how a woman can grow up and evolve into her own while hiding and constantly revealing her past.