Novelist and writing guru Courtney Maum takes readers on a candid, deeply moving journey that details how she found her way out of a labyrinth of depression by rekindling her passion for horses.
By her 35th birthday, Maum (Before and After the Book Deal; Costalegre) was a successful novelist, working on her second book. She was at her happiest--a beloved wife and doting mother of a beautiful baby girl, Nina. She and her equally creative filmmaker husband had moved from Brooklyn, N.Y., into a fixer-upper house they bought in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. But when Nina turned two, something undefinable manifested in Maum--an existential crisis: "At thirty-seven, I did not know what depression looked like, but I refused to admit that it could look like me: a woman with a mortgage and a helpful husband and a healthy child.... That I felt sadness was undeniable, but I felt no right to claim it." Maum was deluged with roiling feelings that stalled her writing, plagued her with insomnia and provoked a general feeling of emotional malaise. A non-life-threatening car crash sustained with her husband and daughter "was a match to the depression" that would all-out engulf her. However, the accident proved a necessary jolt that sent Maum on a journey to reassess her life and decipher what might bring her a sense of peace and joy, and restore her equilibrium.
In therapy, Maum mined her past, recognizing how she missed her affinity and fascination for horses, starting when she was five years old and received a behemoth carved-mahogany rocking horse for Christmas. When she turned six, Santa Claus delivered her a real pony, boarded in a barn near her family's Greenwich, Conn., home. This flurry of youthful excitement and purposeful connection was short-lived--it ended when Maum's parents divorced when she was eight years old and her younger brother faced harrowing chronic illness that took precedence during her foundational years. Maum gave up horses and riding for the next three decades.
Maum's journey of healing and salvation in reconnecting to equine culture--including riding lessons and pursuing competitive polo--is wittily engaging and uncompromisingly forthright. In surmounting personal obstacles and fears, she confronts the past, while also braiding in delightful flourishes regarding the metaphorical meanings of horses and the universal role they have played throughout history and in the arts. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines
Shelf Talker: This candid, resolute memoir details how a writer suffering an existential crisis found healing and salvation in her passion for horses.