Half Broke Horses, part 2

When Jeanette Walls wrote her first book The Glass Castle a few years back she was best known (to me at least) as the gossip columnist for msnbc.com, writing snippets about celebs like Paris Hilton and Jude Law. So it was surprising that she produced such a well written and touching memoir about growing up poor. Raised by parents she adored, Rose Mary and Rex, who by any standards would be considered unfit and even abusive, Walls and her siblings were frequently uprooted and moved to new places, each one in worse shape than the one they left behind. Her optimistic outlook on their dire circumstances and the way she writes, with humor, about overcoming her upbringing and becoming a success, was poignant. In particular her mother, clearly mentally unstable was a curious character. So in Walls’ new book Half Broke Horses, a ‘true life novel’ it isn’t surprising that she delves into the background of her mom when she tells the story of the life of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith.

The book, told in Lily’s voice, begins on an August afternoon on their family farm in west Texas. She writes, “Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.” When the animals started to act “all bothered, stiff legged and straight tailed” Lily pressed her ear to the ground and felt a rumbling. She got up, grabbed her brother and sister’s hands and ran for the tallest tree they could find and climbed to the top just as a flash flood slammed into the tree. Thus began her story. Written in short chapters, only about two pages each, it reads more like a diary than a novel which makes it a very quick read. She writes of her childhood breaking horses for her crippled dad, leaving home at age 15 to travel 500 miles on horseback for a teaching job on the frontier. Walls doesn’t lose her penchant for humor when she writes of Lily’s mom: “Mom didn’t quite know what to make of me. She feared she might have trouble marrying me off because I didn’t have the makings of a lady. I was a little bowlegged, for one thing. Mom said it was because I rode horses too much. Also, my front teeth jutted out, so she bought me a red silk fan to cover my mouth. Whenever I laughed or smiled too big, Mom would say, “Lily dear, the fan.” Lily lives life to the fullest, flying airplanes, driving a ‘taxi’ (actually a hearse), surviving the suicide of her sister and running a ranch with her husband.

Though worth the read, Half Broke Horses, doesn’t have the emotional impact of Glass Castle, maybe because even though it was her family’s story she was telling, it wasn’t her own and though she was careful to tell how brave, strong and tough her grandmother was, I wish Lily could have had a crack at telling her own story, just like her granddaughter did.