Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls (2009)

I recently read Half Broke Horses, the novel by Jeannette Walls that is closely based on the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. It's sort of a prequel to her memoir The Glass Castle, and and if you haven't read that, some of the episodes in Horses won't have nearly as much effect. Also, Walls seems to be trying to explore how her mother Rosemary got to be how she is.

This was a deeply absorbing account of a remarkable woman: indeed, a remarkable girl, because Lily had to find courage and resourcefulness at a very young age, living out west with her homesteading family. Her Victorian la-di-da mother thought herself too fine and delicate to ever do any work, and was very comfortable with letting her children cook, clean, and do chores. Lily, as the oldest, essentially ran the household and kept them going, as her dreamer father wasted money on doomed schemes.

Lily didn't waste time feeling sorry for herself. She got herself a slap-dash education, and by 15, she traveled several days and 500 miles on horseback so that she could take up her first teaching job. Eventually she and her husband turned to ranching, a life that suited them perfectly. She learns to drive; she takes flying lessons. Throughout her long life, through disappointment and mistakes, tragedy and lean times, her tough, practical, unsentimental hard work got her through.

Lily didn't waste time feeling sorry for others, either. Her usual response to someone, for example, falling off a horse: "He's fine, he just got the lace knocked off his panties." She didn't believe in "mollycoddling" sick children. With her children, especially Rosemary, she's more a teacher than a mother: "From the time she was three, I drilled Rosemary on her numbers. If she asked for a glass of milk, I told her she could have it only if she spelled out "milk." I tried to make her see that everything in life . . . was a lesson." The reason, she says, is that "I wanted to get across the idea that the world was a dangerous place and life was unpredictable and you had to be smart, focused, and determined to make it through."

As readers familiar with The Glass Castle know, the main lesson Rosemary took from all this was to please herself and scavenge her way through life, and not care what anyone else thinks. (In this she bears not a little resemblance to Lily's own mother.) But by not being able to understand her daughter, Lily drives her away.

Lily was an amazing woman, but also her toughness became hardness. By the end of the book you can sense what she lost from that. The novel concludes with Jeannette's birth to Rosemary and her new husband, Rex. Lily is sure that she won't be "cut out of the action when it came to my own grandchildren. I had a few things to teach those kids, and there wasn't a soul alive who could stop me." For once, Lily was wrong.