The Year of the Horses

There it was: the peat smell of an ending summer, oiled leather, hay wet with rain. The horse was as black as the sharp keys on a piano with magnificent brown eyes. My heart sang out to this great beast, and he answered with a toot through his gigantic nostrils. I was dressed. The horse was tacked. It was time to go.

Courtney Maum is thirty-seven-years-old when she finds herself in an indoor arena in Connecticut, moments away from stepping back into the saddle. For her, this is not just a riding lesson but a last-ditch attempt to pull herself back from the brink, even though riding is a relic from the past she walked away from. She hasn’t been on or near a horse in over thirty years.

Although Maum does know what depression looks like, she finds herself refusing to admit, at this point in her life, that it could look like her: a woman with a mortgage, a husband, a healthy child, and a published novel. That she feels sadness is undeniable, but she feels no right to claim it.

And when both therapy and medication fail, Courtney returns to her childhood passion of horseback riding as a way to recover the joy and fearlessness she once had access to as a young girl. As she finds her way, once again, through the world of horseback riding—and how she fits within it—Courtney becomes reacquainted with herself not only as a rider but as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a writer, and a woman.

Alternating timelines and braided with historical portraits of women and horses alongside history’s attempts to tame both parties, this courageous, timely memoir is a love letter to the power of animals—and humans—to heal the mind and the heart.