Courtney Maum - The Year of the Horses: A Memoir

THE YEAR
OF THE
HORSES

A MEMOIR

COURTNEY MAUM

TIN HOUSE / Portland, Oregon

For now just remember how you felt the day you were born: desperate for magic, ready to love.

KATE BAER, What Kind of Woman

For my firefighters

A t the age of thirtyseven, Courtney Maum finds herself in an indoor arena in Connecticut, moments away from stepping back into the saddle. For her, this is not just a riding lesson, but a last-ditch attempt to pull herself back from the brink even though riding is a relic from the past she walked away from. She hasnt been on or near a horse in over thirty years.

Although Courtney does know what depression looks like, she finds herself refusing to admit, at this point in her life, that it could look like her: a woman with a privileged past, a mortgage, a husband, a healthy child, and a published novel. That she feels sadness is undeniable, but she feels no right to claim it. And when both therapy and medication fail, Courtney returns to her childhood passion of horseback riding as a way to recover the joy and fearlessness she once had access to as a young girl. As she finds her way, once again, through the physical and emotional landscapes of riding, Courtney becomes reacquainted with herself not only as a rider but as a mother, wife, daughter, writer, and woman. Alternating timelines and braided with historical portraits of women and horses alongside historys attempts to tame both parties, The Year of the Horses is an inspiring love letter to the power of animalsand humansto heal the mind and the heart.

Searing, lucid, tender, and wise, The Year of the Horses is a moving, beautifully written interrogation into a complicated, privileged childhood and its aftermath. Courtney Maum weaves together the sensory, tactile world of horses and their capacity to heal us, along with one of the most illuminating and powerful depictions of depression I have ever read. Oh, and its also a page-turner. I tore through it with immense pleasure.

DANI SHAPIRO , bestselling author of Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Gorgeously written, wry but loving, heartbreaking and, most of all, roving...The Year of the Horses is a memoir of power and beauty and pain that moves across the world like the beautiful horses that carry it.

LISA TADDEO , bestselling author of Animal

Tender, honest, and beautifully written.

KATE BAER , bestselling author of What Kind of Woman

If, like me at age fifty, you have a hankering to resume riding again (never mind that its been thirty-four years), this is the book for you. Courtney will show you her way to this particular form of personal salvation.

SALLY MANN , National Book Award finalist and author of Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

Courtney Maum dives into her own life with the same fearlessness and honesty that she brings to her fiction. The Year of the Horses is a beautiful, unflinching exploration of darkness and self-forgiveness, terror and tenderness.

HALA ALYAN , author of The Arsonists City

Here is a book where the author writes not from an ideal of who she should be, but as she is. It lacks performative overtones or those typical bits where the reader is assured the author is self-aware. No, its nothing like that. The Year of the Horses sings like the world actually feels, it gives us permission to be who we are, and its written by one of the besta writers writerwith a maturity that reveals her decades-long devotion to her craft.

HOLLY WHITAKER , bestselling author of Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

The concept of finding safety in a dangerous sport wont make sense to everyone, but the way that Courtney found meaning and magic in horses resonates with me. As a polo player, I loved the sometimes laugh-out-loud journey of an adult trying against all odds to learn the sport of kings. This is a great memoir that somehow manages to be both deeply moving and funny.

KAREEM ROSSER , author of Crossing the Line: A Fearless Team of Brothers and the Sport That Changed Their Lives Forever

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THE NIGHT MARE

I am standing by our front door as my daughter works her socks on. She is two years old, her blond wisps curling from exertion. The socks are pink or they are whiteit doesnt matter, because they are not socks, they are the enemy.

Just put your socks on, honey, I say, willing mercy from the lava building up inside me. Just pull them on.

My daughter scrunches her face into a protest of discomfort. The toe seams have to be perfectly aligned across the tip-top of each toe. The heel pads have to fit neatly over the heels. The big-girl tugging on of my toddlers socks can take upwards of eight minutes. Every. Single. Morning.

My husband, Leo, is out scouting a location for a film he is trying to raise money for. Or he is outside on the phone begging for that money in the one spot on our dirt road where we get two bars. I have lost track of his end goal, Ive lost track of where he is; it seems to me that every day is a dj vu of professional instability and my daughters war with socks. What matters, though, what is urgent, is that I am alone in a log cabin with a wild animal who has to put on clothes.

Putain, Nina, Mama has to go !

There it is, the first spout of lava. My husband is French, so when I swear in front of our daughter, I coat bad words in this foreign language, hoping it will soften their impact. Ninas face reddens and her concentrated lips tremble: the landing wasnt soft. I need to back off. I dont.

Dammit, Nina, if you could just get the damn socks on! Go barefoot! I cant take it! Mama has to go !

Ninas dimpled hands drop to her sides. Her face collapses. She begins to sob. My heart divides: one half wants to get down and hold her, apologize for the fact that she has an impatient, desperate mother; the other wants to hurl fire from my mouth, wants to scream so loud it scares her, wants the battle of attrition with the socks and the zippers and the tomato sauce to stop.

I wrap my arms around my daughter and lift her struggling limbs into the air, my muscles straining against the fury of her temper tantrum. Grasping her shoes and shoving them under my armpit, I walk out of the house like this, my boots crunching on the autumn frost as Nina tries to kick me. I will drive her to day care barefoot. We will try again in the parking lot. We will try again.

Have you taken a depression intake survey before? asks the fledgling therapist I have chosen from a list of local providers on the World Wide Web, apparently erroneously, because there is no way I can bare my soul to a twentysomething in a Livestrong bracelet. Even his nameJoeseems incongruous with the bookish sophistication Id fantasized a therapist possessing. I shift in the plush seat that holds me like a velvet clam. Somewhere behind me, a white noise machine hisses a eucalyptus scent.

I dont know, I answer. I dont think so? I look down at the sheet of questions. Fathers parenting style, mothers parenting style, religious upbringing. My stomach clenches. Or maybe once? My parents sent me to a therapist when they got divorced. Or my mother did. My mother made me.