The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah Maslin Nir’s restorative memoir will chime with readers indifferent to things horsey. Part love letter, part reportage, it niftily braids together her family history, the history of horses, and the stories of the humans on and around them. The result is a tender and at times funny book about belonging.
Nir grew up between New York City and the tip of Long Island. Her parents — struggling professionals, ‘two doctors seeking to climb a ladder of affluence’ — had bought a Park Avenue apartment for $45,000 and a beach shack in a patch of East Hampton too shabby for swank Manhattanites. Born in Poland in 1930, her psychiatrist father — a Holocaust survivor who had evaded Hitler as a boy — was ‘emphatically a foreigner’. Attuned to his Freudian methods, Nir wonders if her love of riding — ‘the sport of kings and Kennedys, a pursuit dripping with elitism and Americana’ — is a symptom of her urge to be less Jewish, more American.
In fact it was her parents who first plonked her on a horse: she was two, and they were keen for her to sit still. They had no idea that their parenting ploy would spark in her a lifelong obsession. In the decade she’s worked for the New York Times she’s reported from around the world, and wherever she’s gone she’s sought out horses.
Her equine encounters are recorded with an immediacy that makes us feel like we’re standing by her side — or sitting with her in a kayak. She describes in painterly detail the feral ponies of Assateague Island swimming across a saltwater channel, the tiny foals with ‘trumpet noses and peach fuzz manes’ paddling alongside their dams.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in