WILD GAME: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur

Nothing draws me into a story more than the dynamics between an unconventional mother-daughter relationship, and this memoir is unputdownable reading. Brodeur is fourteen years old when her mother, a food writer for the New York Times, tells her daughter she’s kissed her husband’s best friend. Ensnared by her mother’s attention, the author becomes complacent in keeping the affair secret for years. There’s lots of eating and drinking and buried secrets. Lots of secrets. It isn’t until the author moves away that she begins to see her relationship with her mother as unhealthy and untenable. The breaking away for both comes with emotional consequences. “Wild Game” is a memoir that reads like a novel. I loved it.

Favorite line(s): Blink, and you’ll miss your treasure. Blink again, and you’ll realize that the truth you thought was safely hidden has materialized, some ungainly part of it revealed under new conditions. We all know the adage that one lie begets the next. Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it. For years and years, my job was to pile on sand—fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated—in an effort to keep my mother’s secret buried.

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD by Claire Lombardo

This is a big, gangly family saga that would make a terrific eight-part series on Netflix. If you like unlikeable characters (not serial murderer unlikable), you’ll appreciate Lombardo’s depiction of the four Sorenson daughters. Wendy, the sharp-tongued unlucky oldest. Violet, selfish, clueless, and mean-spirited despite her riches. Lisa, a gentle soul, tiptoeing around others while ignoring her own happiness, and Grace, hiding out across the country living a lie so as not to disappoint her parents. The parents’ relationship forms the backbone of the story. And how the daughters spend most of the novel trying to find a love like Marilyn and David’s almost forty-year marriage. “I feel—lucky, actually,” Liza said. “It made for a wonderful childhood, you have to admit. But it feels like a pretty fucking insurmountable bar to reach as an adult.” But of course, all is not perfect in any relationship, mostly the marriage kind. There is lots of redundant storytelling, but Lombardo juggles all these distinct character voices like a master eavesdropper.

Favorite line(s): All the times they’d fought in the last months. All the times they’d argued over Wendy’s treatment, Violet’s obstinacy, Liza’s isolation, Gracie’s arrested development. The house, the dog, the oil in their cars. All the times he’d yelled and she’d wept, or she’d yelled and he’d sat there, stock-still and expressionless, in his collected way that drove her crazy All the times they’d spoken to each other through the children without even realizing it—“Tell your father you need a ride” or “Ask you mom that, Gracie.” All the times they could have been kind to each other and had instead chosen ignorance, solitude. She missed him so much.

YEAR OF THE MONKEY by Patti Smith

Smith begins 2016, the Year of the Monkey, at the Dream Motel. Dreams occupy a lot of Smith’s narrative as she travels to California, Arizona, Virginia, Kentucky, Lisbon, Portugal, and New York City, taking polaroid photos of eclectic things along the way. What bookends her musings are close friends who died that year: Sandy Perlman, the person who convinced her to front a rock band, and Sam Shepard, a long-time friend who she helps finish his last novel. Smith wanders from place to place noticing symbols everywhere (candy wrappers and forgotten clothes) while drinking boatloads of coffee (probably why she can’t sleep at night?) all the while seeing ghosts of her dead family and friends as she wonders what is happening to the world as she gets closer to her 70th birthday. Sounds weird? It is weird but in classic Smith prose poetry.

Favorite line(s): And so it continued. No matter which way I stepped or whatever plane I was on, it was still the Year of the Monkey. I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges, the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost. I wiped the shit from my shoes again and again, still going about my business, that of being alive, the best I could. Although an insidious insomnia was slowly claiming my nights, giving way to the replaying of the afflictions of the world at dawn.