The year of the horses A memoir

As a young girl, novelist Maum (Costalegre, 2019) rode horses until her parents' divorce and the complications of her brother's illness forced her to quit. Now grown, married, and mother to a toddler, she has a seemingly perfect life. But she isn't sleeping, she struggles with her strong-willed daughter, and her marriage is fraying. She knows she's depressed. Therapy proves helpful in recalling the struggles of her parents' divorce and her anorexia as a youth. Driving home from one of her first sessions, she sees horses and remembers the joy and freedom she felt when riding. Maum here explores the love affair many young girls have with horses, in particular reminiscing about the horse in The Neverending Story. Slowly, she comes to realize that the need to achieve and have control has its limits. On a whim, she decides to try polo, which fills her with fear but also makes her feel alive. Many women may find much to relate to in Maum's vulnerable and human story, which could be a favorite for book clubs.

In this wry and tender account, novelist Maum (Costalegre) chronicles her attempt to rekindle joy through a return to her childhood love of horseback riding. Three decades after her last ride, Maum was spurred to get back in the saddle when, as a new mother in her mid-30s, she became depressed. "Frequently referred to as a 'stealth therapy,' interaction with horses has been known to benefit people," she writes. "If you aren't calm, the horse won't be, either." She charts her "mental health improvement spree" with sardonic humor and a discerning gaze (upon first meeting her therapist, she laments, "there is no way I can bare my soul to a twentysomething in a Livestrong bracelet"). Meanwhile, despite the "violent" nature of polo, she takes up the sport and rediscovers her sensuality, a liberating contrast to her writing career and struggle to get pregnant again. Interspersed throughout are entertaining morsels of horse culture history--from polo's contested origins in either China or Persia to the hero's drowning horse in The NeverEnding Story. While cynics might categorize Maum's memoir as a midlife crisis story, she resists the label: "When we bang our fists against the bars of middle age, it's usually because there is a voice within us that is sick to death of going unused." Her account of recovering that voice is vivid and exuberantly cathartic. (May)

A despondent writer finds solace on horseback. Novelist Maum has loved horses from the age of 5, when her wish to Santa was answered in the form of a large rocking horse. Wishing harder the next year, she finally got a pony of her own. But she stopped riding when she was 9, when her parents' divorce and her younger brother's life-threatening illness shut down the expensive and time-consuming pleasure. Maum's forthright, searching memoir centers on her rediscovery of her "joyful, weird, magical" love of horses and her gradual emergence from debilitating depression, insomnia, and overwhelming sadness. At the age of 37, she was a productive writer, married to a French filmmaker, mother of a young daughter, living in a charming New England town. "That I felt sadness was undeniable," she admits, "but I felt no right to claim it." A therapist helped her reflect on her past to find the source of the fears, perfectionism, and competitiveness that dogged her throughout her life and threatened her marriage and her relationship with her daughter. But Maum was drawn, besides, to engage in something physical, an activity so consuming that, she hoped, it would open up "an escape from my domestic life." Impulsively, she decided to take riding lessons, which proved more challenging--and more rewarding--than she had anticipated. "Frequently referred to as a 'stealth therapy,' " she learned, "interaction with horses has been known to benefit people who struggle with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and fearfulness because horses mirror human emotions. If you aren't calm, the horse won't be, either, and denial doesn't get you far with a herd animal." Maum's pleasure in riding led her to polo--"something that I wasn't good at, that made me afraid," and for which she needed to learn a new set of skills, including the ability just to have fun. A sensitive, well-rendered chronicle of healing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

I park the Nissan Cube we've replaced our totaled Toyota with outside what appears to be a covered riding arena. It's the first time I've come anywhere near an equestrian facility in over thirty years. The dirt gives way under my car tires: it's been a rainy fall. I'm not at this barn in northern Massachusetts to ride--or so I tell myself. I am here to research. With the September 2015 deadline for my second novel missed, I'm trying to play catch-up. There is a male character in my manuscript who is a dressage champion with a horse-breeder mother who works out of a barn near the ocean in Cape Cod. I know precious little about either of these undertakings, and so I've driven two hours north from the Berkshires to talk to someone who does: Amanda Traber, a famed dressage trainer whose barn is near the Cape but not on it, because one of the first things Amanda will set straight about my fiction is that it costs an unholy fortune to have a horse barn by the sea. To quiet the sheepishness I feel about imposing my quest for fleshed-out characters onto a busy stranger, I run through the questions I've prepared. What makes a dressage horse talented? How did Amanda get into the sport? How does she talk about her passion to people who don't ride? I feel both ill at ease and excited to be at a stable as a writer instead of as a rider. It steadies my nerves to focus on the writing part. Amanda is waiting for me just past the stall mats in the facility's entrance, and the short walk gives me several beats to collect myself after the smash of the barn smell. Once I actually start riding again, I will talk with women who were pulled back into horse madness by the siren of that smell alone. In terms of the perfume hitting, there is the animal musk first--the sun-warmed, dirty honey of the place where large head meets muscled neck, the encapsulated summer scent of flaked hay, peaty manure, the reek of riding gloves that never truly dry, the stench of humid fly sheets folded by horse stalls. But underneath these organic smells lie the deeply personal: the acrid punch of the oil dripping underneath my mother's waiting Wagoneer, the sudden tang of cologne wafting up from the front hall, which meant my father was home from Wall Street early. The smell of the linseed oil my mother rubbed and rubbed on my giant Christmas present in hopes that the wooden horse would be easier to rock. "Remind me what you need again?" Amanda asks. "Did you want to ride?" Excerpted from The Year of the Horses: A Memoir by Courtney Maum All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.