INSIDE Romance as a B-movie horror What jobs are left for future humans? Isabel Allende’s Chilean epic

kissed me.” Overnight the child became her mother’s confidante and eager accomplice, offering alibis for the lovers’ trysts and basking in the praise she earned for the lies she told on their behalf.

“I knew only what pleased my mother,” Brodeur writes. “I didn’t have a moral compass… Lies of omission became lies of commission. What began as choice turned into habit and became my conscience’s muscle memory.” She pushed away thoughts of how she was betraying her stepfather and Souther’s wife, who were often sipping cocktails at the table while their spouses kissed in the kitchen. On the brink of womanhood, she let her mother’s mature sexuality subsume her own.

Brodeur stopped dating the local boy who had just started to slip his hands under her T-shirt, opting to watch instead as: “My mother and Ben shucked oysters, plucked feathers from mallards, ripped innards out of woodland creatures. Their patter was filled with pornographic double-entendres about the game they roasted, the savoury loins, luscious breasts, tender thighs. They slurped clams from their shells, gnawed on bones and sucked out the marrow.” Engineering a way to spend more time together, the lovers tell their spouses they are working on a hunter gatherer’s cookbook, whose dormant title – Wild Game – Brodeur resurrects for her memoir.

Seductive and sickening by turns, Brodeur’s prose bubbles to its best in the passages about her mother’s carnal cuisine. Every meal is served with lashings of booze; Malabar’s heady confessions all come scented with the musk of pinot noir, or the bitter twist of a dry Manhattan. Brodeur’s stomach cramps with the overwhelming guilt of it all and she pops antacids like candy.

Attempting to separate from her mother as an adult, Brodeur struggles to find her own identity and even marries Souther’s son in an attempt to validate the ongoing affair. When he finally finds out what’s been happening, her husband is appalled by how she has been used, yet she continues to defend Malabar.

The final third of this memoir details Brodeur’s grim struggle to extricate herself from her mother’s manipulations. Each agonised step is met with breathtaking spite from Malabar. The lovers finally marry with indecent haste after their spouses die, and do not want their former helpmeet around to remind them of what they once were.

Although some critics have failed to understand why Brodeur couldn’t walk away, anybody who has struggled to pull away from a toxic family member will understand that “detaching with love” are easier words to type than to live. Yes, it’s a bit icky when Brodeur slips into therapy mantras, learning to “become my own best friend”. But it feels churlish to resent her search for simple truths after living through such dark, tangled deceit. Now

51, she seems happy with her second husband and their children. Souther is dead and Malabar is being lost to dementia. Although Brodeur writes that she has broken her mother’s hold, I’m not sure she ever will. In the final line of her acknowledgements, Brodeur thanks Malabar: “My first and most abiding love.”

Brodeur offered alibis for the lovers’ trysts, basking in the praise she earned for her lies

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