Jane Smiley on Horses and Writing Fiction

At one point while breeding racehorses, novelist Jane Smiley owned 15 of them. She purchased her first, a white Thoroughbred gelding named Mr. T, an ex-racehorse, after the success of A Thousand Acres, a feminist retelling of King Lear that won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize. Smiley was 43 years old. Mr. T had a lot of wins, had made money, and had been well traveled; he gave rise to her desire to breed more racehorses, who, in turn, inspired books like Horse Heaven (2000) and, later, Perestroika in Paris (2020).

In 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), Smiley wonders whether the passion for horses she developed in her 40s shifted her relationship with novel writing, noting, “After 1993, the horses intruded upon and then displaced the novels.” But her love of horses extends further back, into her childhood. A Year at the Races (2005) has Smiley writing, “Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.” When she was five years old, in Webster Groves, Missouri, she started out with pony rides at a place that lay between her grandparents’ house and her mother’s apartment. As a teenager, she began riding horses obsessively—her parents bought her one—but she gave up riding in college, around the time she began to consider the possibility of becoming a novelist.

One Christmas Eve day, while living in a creekside commune in Saugerties, New York, with her husband and the men he had graduated from college with, Smiley began reading Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and she found it so easy to imagine that she read it in one day. “That’s when I thought, Well, maybe I should try this,” she says to me on a winter afternoon over Zoom, from a black leather chair where she’s drinking Diet Coke. After she graduated from Vassar College in 1971, she and her husband went on a tour of Europe and hitchhiked everywhere—he was willing to carry the typewriter. “Everything was so interesting that I just started writing, and when I came back from Europe, it was a habit I couldn’t get rid of,” she explains.

This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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When she purchased Mr. T, however, she felt she had found her destiny. He was one of the reasons she moved from Iowa—where she’d attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, earned her PhD from the University of Iowa, and taught at Iowa State University—to Carmel Valley. She and her third husband needed a good horse spot, and the house that she bought had its own stable, arena, and turnout. She took up racehorse breeding in Carmel Valley, and she stuck with that life over decades; she was fascinated by how different the horses’ personalities were and by the intelligence of the animals. “I also had kids of my own, so it struck me like having kids,” Smiley says, noting that because she bred the horses, knowing them from their birth, she could see how their early life, their first two years, was critical to their development. “Some of them had issues. Some of them were always good.… Some of them were way more observant than other horses, and some were more nervous.” She stopped riding this past July. The horse she rode sometimes had anxiety issues, and at 75, Smiley realized she was too old to risk being thrown. She now visits her two horses with carrots and cookies and does a lot of walking and exploring on her own around the Monterey Peninsula.

It’s impossible to find a clear throughline in Smiley’s oeuvre—she’s worked in many genres across her more than 30 insightful, sensitively drawn books, 20 of which are works of fiction for adults—but horses have played roles of varying importance in a great many of them. (You might be able to make a similar case for women’s lives and curious characters, but I think Smiley’s horses slightly edge these out.) She kicked off her career in 1980 with Barn Blind. It’s set on a horse farm and concerns an ambitious mother of four who is determined to turn her children into Olympic-level equestrians—courting tragedy. The idea for the novel came when Smiley was living in Iowa; she hadn’t been around horses in a significant way since high school but went to work for a family with a barn, mucking stalls and the like. “It was totally interesting to me to be among this family and doing the thing that is my absolute favorite thing to do, which is eavesdropping,” she says. “Watching them and seeing how the mother and the kids got along. Seeing how different the kids were from one another, seeing how they treated the horses.”

She sent Barn Blind to a former fellow student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who had become an editor; the woman purchased the book for $5,000, which seemed to Smiley like a lot at the time. She explains that because more women were becoming editors then, she had little trouble attracting interest for her books, which were often about women. But the first few she wrote, Smiley says, were her way of tiptoeing into the life of a published author; they weren’t attended by much publicity.

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton is a 1998 novel whose seeds can be found in the Oklahoma City bombing. Smiley was with one of her then-young daughters in Washington, D.C., when it happened, and she called her daughter’s father, a history professor, from whom she was divorced, to assure him that everything was quiet there. She talked to him about needing to write a book about violence in American history, and he told her to look at Kansas in the 1850s. In All-True Travels, a young, very tall woman, Lidie Newton (Smiley is also tall), marries an abolitionist, and he takes her to the Kansas Territory, a site of great violence between pro-slavery Border Ruffians and free-stater abolitionists. After Lidie’s husband and her horse, Jeremiah, a gray inspired by Smiley’s Mr. T, are killed by Border Ruffians in front of her, she travels Missouri as a man to hunt down the murderers.

Christie Hemm Klok

Jane Smiley’s forthcoming novel, Lidie, is a sequel to All-True Travels.

When Smiley first started writing novels, she tells me, she knew she wanted to write a tragedy (A Thousand Acres), a comedy (Moo), and an epic (The Greenlanders). She also wanted to write a romance in the original sense of that genre: an adventure story about “getting around and checking things out.” She fulfilled her wish. All-True Travels became the romance. Many of Lidie’s personality traits as a protagonist befit the genre, though her status as a woman complicates her efforts. Lidie’s expansive curiosity motivates her to get out into the world and find out more about what she sees, and she frequently has to reinvent herself to survive her shifting environments.

Smiley reveals that she returned to her early wish to write in multiple genres while working on Horse Heaven, which tells the intricate stories of a large cast of characters on the racing circuit, including owners, trainers, and horses. “I thought it would be fun to put a tragic horse, a comic horse, a romantic horse, and an epic horse in Horse Heaven, but I knew I had to have realistic horses, too,” she tells me. One of the horses in the book, a kind, loving one, is named Mr. T—she says she sees him as a realistic horse. “The quality of ‘kindness’ is common in horses,” she writes in A Year at the Races. Meanwhile, the most unusually drawn horse in Smiley’s work may be the titular character in her charming novel Perestroika in Paris, who is inspired by her own 21-year-old horse Perestroika. In a typically bold artistic choice, the novel is full of anthropomorphic characters, not only Perestroika, or Paras, but also a German shorthaired pointer, ducks, and a raven—and unlike in Horse Heaven, these animals engage in conversations. It’s a fable that goes beyond the human lens to delve into the psyches of the animals. At one point, for example, the pointer, Frida, thinks, “Humans were pushovers for tricks.… Tricks got you money, and then you took the money and exchanged it for what you wanted.”

Smiley’s forthcoming novel, Lidie, a sequel to All-True Travels, includes, in small part, a high-spirited filly named Toffee, trained for racing and also inspired by the writer’s own Perestroika. Smiley put together the idea for this second book soon after she finished All-True Travels—Lidie was one of her favorite characters that she’d ever written, not least because of her curiosity—but at the end of the first book, it was still the 1850s, and she didn’t want Lidie to become involved in similar violent disputes between abolitionists and pro-slavery elements. In the new novel, Lidie’s niece wants to run away to England to become an actor, and Lidie goes along to protect her, pretending to be her servant. As in All-True Travels, there are a number of references to Lidie’s capacity for gender-bending. But the sequel also contends with lingering grief and the rebuilding of a life and with Lidie’s potential for new romantic relationships after the loss of her husband in the first book.

A pronounced strength of Lidie, and other Smiley books as well, is the author’s command of balancing her characters’ interiority with their external action. Smiley notes that while reading the 130 novels she read to write 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, she could see by the way the form developed that it became much more interior as time went by. She says, “In a novel, not only do you tell what happened, but you have to tell why it happened and what it felt like. And if you don’t tell those things, then the reader is not going to care.”

During a trip to Liverpool, Smiley came to believe it was a more interesting city than she’d imagined, partly because of its importance in the 19th century as a port. Although she loved British literature (around 40 of the 130 novels she read for 13 Ways were by British authors), she had never set a book in the U.K. The more research she did, the more excited she became. “As soon as something becomes way more interesting for you, then you just push, push, push. You just keep going,” she says. “And that’s how I felt about the new travels.”

She asked herself how Lidie would get to Liverpool, looked up the theater there, and realized that Lidie wouldn’t hope to be an actor. However, she remembered that in the first book, Lidie has a niece—more like a sister age-wise—named Annie, who is obedient and whom Lidie’s sisters rely on to get things done. Wanting Annie to escape that, Smiley imagined her aspiring to become an actor, but she didn’t like sending Annie across the Atlantic alone; Lidie would go along.

“I always was very fond of Lidie,” she explains. “In some sense, she feels sort of like a relative, you know. That’s the kind of fondness I feel for her, and maybe it’s because she’s exploratory.” Smiley comments that in today’s world, Lidie might be diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder for not being able to sit down or stay in the house. “She has to get out. And that’s sort of how I am. I was sympathetic with her about that.”

The author, who writes more than one book at a time, enjoying the stimulation of different subject matters, characters, and settings across them, has an idea for a third Lidie novel. Originally, she thought it might be set in Russia. She saw it as an opportunity to explore Russian literature and to take a train ride across the country, but given current events there, she couldn’t figure out how to make the travel work. However, this third novel might be set in Norway instead. Smiley’s great-grandmother was a Norwegian immigrant, and Smiley, who was dumbfounded by the country’s beauty on her one trip there, wants to better know the land of her long-gone relative. She muses, “Maybe it will be paradise for Lidie.”•