Adrienne Brodeur on Family Myths, Wounded People, and Honest Fiction
Description:
Some families run on rules nobody ever wrote down. Here is your role. Here is what we talk about. Here is who gets forgiven and who gets blamed. We accept those terms as children, and then one day we look up and wonder who exactly signed us up for the job.
August’s Jen Hatmaker Book Club pick is Little Monsters, and Adrienne Brodeur came with the whole story behind it. She spent thirty years on the other side of the pen, co-founding Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, editing at HMH Books, judging the National Book Award, and now running Aspen Words. She published one novel of her own in 2005, then waited fourteen years for the next book, a memoir that broke a silence she had kept since she was fourteen.
Adrienne and Jen get into the unspoken rules every family runs on, why estrangement takes love rather than indifference, and what Cain and Abel taught her about the gifts we give our parents. Adrienne explains why fiction can feel more honest than memoir, makes an unpopular case for Ken, and talks about writing mania with compassion rather than spectacle. Plus the stack of books a stepmother handed her that redirected her whole life, the screenplay she is writing, and the book club’s standing offer to cast the movie.
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Thought-provoking Quotes:
- He’s wounded, and wounded people wound. – Adrienne Brodeur
- Understanding someone isn’t quite the same as absolving them. – Adrienne Brodeur
- Fiction can sometimes feel more honest than memoir. I don’t mean factual honesty. I mean emotionally unguarded. – Adrienne Brodeur
- Who the hell decided that peacemaker was my job, or golden child, or secret keeper, or difficult one? – Adrienne Brodeur
- Turns out dead mothers still have an excellent work ethic. – Adrienne Brodeur
- Everyone wanted a flat version of themselves. – Jen Hatmaker
- We have family stories that we’re telling too, even believing, that we’re trying to believe. – Jen Hatmaker
- Some of our characters landed on their feet, but they landed on their feet in a different zip code. – Jen Hatmaker
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Little-Monsters/Adrienne-Brodeur/9781982198114
- Little Monsters book club discussion questions - https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/little-monsters-by-adrienne-brodeur/guide
- Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wild-game-adrienne-brodeur/1130010789
- Man Camp by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001HN38FI
- Aspen Words at the Aspen Institute - https://www.aspeninstitute.org/people/adrienne-brodeur/
- Zoetrope: All-Story, co-founded with Francis Ford Coppola
Guest’s Links:
Adrienne’s Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/adriennebrodeur/
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