ALLIE ROWBOTTOM is the author of the memoir Jell-O Girls, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. Her essays and short fiction can be found in Vanity Fair, Salon, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Disquiet, Summer Literary Seminars, Inprint, and Tin House. Allie holds a PhD from the University of Houston and an MFA from CalArts and lives in LA.
MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Great Circle, Astonish Me, and Seating Arrangements, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
JANE SMILEY’s newest novel is Perestroika in Paris, about a horse who escapes from Auteuil Racecourse and lives in Paris through the winter. She has written many (too many) books about horses, and this is her favorite.
LAURA MAYLENE WALTER’s debut novel, Body of Stars, was published by Dutton in March 2021. Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, the Kenyon Review, The Sun, the Masters Review, Ninth Letter, and many other publications. She has been a Tin House Scholar, a recipient of the Ohioana Library Association’s Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant, and a writer-in-residence at Yaddo, the Chautauqua Institution, and Art Omi: Writers. She lives in Cleveland, where her Breyer horses are still packed away in the attic.
Acknowledgments
Foremost, thank you to the courageous and talented writers who contributed essays; without you this book wouldn’t exist. Thank you to my agent, Sarah Bowlin, my editor, Sarah Stein, and the team at Harper Perennial for making Horse Girls possible. Thank you to my brilliant colleagues at Electric Literature, past and present, particularly Preety Sidhu for her thorough fact-check, and Jess Zimmerman for saying, “Someone should publish a book called Horse Girls, and it should probably be you.” Thank you to my first readers and advisers: Julie Buntin, Libby Flores, Leigh Newman, Steph Opitz, and Matt Sumell; your support and guidance encourage me to write and to take risks.
To Susie Beale, Katie Rinda, and Doug King, thank you for teaching me to ride. To all the horses and ponies I have ridden, or at least as many as I can remember—Silver, Gunny, Tennessee, Lucy, Johnny, Paylon, Charlie, JP, Yankee, Dave, Moose, Woody, and Reagan—thank you for sharing your freedom.
I am endlessly grateful to my parents, Carl and Karin, for their everlasting support; to my sister, Noori, for her lifelong friendship; and to my husband, Paul, for one million years.
About the Editor
HALIMAH MARCUS’s short stories and essays have appeared in One Story, BOMB, the Literary Review, Amazon Original Stories, the Out There podcast, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, the Southampton Review, and elsewhere. She is the executive director of Electric Literature, an innovative digital publishing nonprofit, and the editor in chief of its weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, which she cofounded. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in the Catskill region of New York.
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Copyright
The names of some individuals mentioned in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.
HORSE GIRLS. Copyright © 2021 by Halimah Marcus. “I Don’t Love Horses” copyright © 2021 by T Kira Madden. “Horse Girl: An Inquiry” copyright © 2021 by Carmen Maria Machado. “BreyerFest or Bust” copyright © 2021 by Laura Maylene Walter. “Hungry and Carefree” copyright © 2021 by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich. “Playing Safe” copyright © 2021 by Courtney Maum. “The Shrinking Mountain” copyright © 2021 by Nur Nasreen Ibrahim. “Turnout” copyright © 2021 by C. Morgan Babst. “What Will Leave You” copyright © 2021 by Adrienne Celt. “A Racer Without a Pedigree” copyright © 2021 by Sarah Enelow-Snyder. “No Regrets” copyright © 2021 by Jane Smiley. “Daredevils” copyright © 2021 by Maggie Shipstead. “Unconquered” copyright © 2021 by Braudie Blais-Billie. “For the Roses” copyright © 2021 by Allie Rowbottom. “We Aren’t Close to Anywhere” copyright © 2021 by Rosebud Ben-Oni. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Caroline Johnson
Cover image © The_burtons/Getty Images
Digital Edition AUGUST 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-300926-4
Version 05222021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-300925-7
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1Horse Crazy: Girls and the Lives of Horses, Jean O’Malley Halley
Horse Girls Page 24
