Horse
Horse
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Geraldine Brooks on Horse
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A skeleton in a forgotten atticThe book began at a lunch Brooks was not especially focused on. She had been brought to a donor event at Plimoth Patuxent Museum in 2011 to hear a pitch about an early settler, a project she already knew she would not take on. A Smithsonian official at the same table was telling a different story to someone else, and she found herself listening to that one instead.
It started just with the story of a horse that was so intriguing, the twists and turns in the horse’s racing career. There’s great drama in that. And then what happened to the horse during the Civil War — and I was a goner. As soon as I learned that part of the story, I knew it was for me. What I didn’t realize until I got into studying the history of the horse and who was responsible for his success was that I couldn’t just write about a racehorse. I also had to write about race. I couldn’t leave that story in the past, either. It had to come into the present because it’s not over.
The horse in question was Lexington, a 19th-century thoroughbred who had been a genuine national celebrity, his races drawing crowds in the tens of thousands, before his skeleton spent decades in a forgotten Washington attic. The Smithsonian official had just retrieved it. Brooks left that lunch knowing she had her next book.
She began writing just after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, and the political moment kept pressing itself into the manuscript. The novel’s 2019 storyline, following a contemporary Black art historian named Theo, was not part of the original plan. Two specific events made it unavoidable.
As White supremacists rioted in Charlottesville and George Floyd died under the knee of a White police officer, I knew I could not deal with racism in the past and not address its loud and tragic echoes in the present.
Once she saw that the enslaved and formerly enslaved horsemen were the real architects of Lexington’s success, leaving them out of the narrative became its own kind of harm. The white owners and the horse alone were not the story.
I could have written about the horse and the white owners, but that, to me, would be another unconscionable erasure of the contributions of the Black horsemen. So I knew I was going to have to go there.
How she wrote it
Fingernails, beetles, and a strand she didn’t planBrooks does not settle the research before she starts writing. She uses the draft itself as a diagnostic tool, writing until the prose bumps up against something she doesn’t know, and then going to find it. For the 19th-century material, the Keeneland Library in Kentucky was central, and she read original race reports in sequence from bound volumes of old newspapers.
I let the story drive the research. So I start writing the story until I get to a point where I need to know something. Like, you know, obvious example: How do you train a horse? It’s easy to find how they do it now, but to go back and find out how they did it to create these incredible four mile horses, who could last that distance, as well as turn on blistering speed. So that was fascinating.
The Martha Jackson strand, which pulls the novel into the post-war New York art world, came entirely from following a provenance trail. When Brooks went to examine the Smithsonian’s painting of Lexington, she learned it had arrived as part of a bequest from Martha Jackson, a gallery owner famous for championing Abstract Expressionists including Pollock and de Kooning. The Lexington painting was the only traditional, representational work in her entire bequest.
I think the connection between the horse and Jackson Pollock. That, you really couldn’t make up.
That accidental discovery let Brooks draw on a fine arts degree she had rarely used in her fiction before, writing the novel’s second strand through the eyes of Theo, whose scholarship traces Lexington’s painted image across American art history.
The three-strand structure, alternating between 1850, 1954, and 2019, was not designed before she wrote it. She was well into the manuscript before she could see how the timelines would join, and she spent a long stretch writing on faith that a connection existed.
I had to sort of pick away at the stitching bit by bit and just take it on trust that eventually I would find how these stories were going to connect. But it took quite a long time into the writing to get to that point. So I was kind of hanging by my fingernails there. [paraphrased from audio]
Writing Theo, the contemporary Black art historian, was the hardest work in the book. She was aware of the debate around white writers writing Black experience and did not try to solve it alone. She asked Black friends to read early drafts and give her direct feedback.
I relied on the absolute generosity and forbearance of black friends who shared their experiences and who read early drafts and said, that’s crap. And you need to do this and you need to do that. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A dedication she had to earnHer husband, Tony Horwitz, was researching Frederick Law Olmsted’s pre-Civil War Southern travels at the same time she was writing the novel, and the two projects kept crossing paths in Kentucky, with some of the same historical figures appearing in both books. When Horwitz died suddenly in 2019, midway through her draft, she set the manuscript aside for about a year. The advice that eventually brought her back to the desk was one she traced to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Do your work. It might not be your best work, but it’ll be good work, and it will be what saves you. [paraphrased from audio]
Returning to the manuscript was not only a professional act. She needed a reason anchored to him specifically, something the finished book could carry that the unfinished one could not.
I needed to finish it. And I needed to finish it so that I could dedicate it to him. [paraphrased from audio]
The art history strand also had a personal origin. Brooks had held a fine arts degree for decades without finding a novel that could use it. Writing Theo’s scholarship gave her the first real occasion to put that training to work, and she was candid about the pleasure that brought.
Art has been a very big part of my life since I was about nine years old... I became fascinated with the study of art. One of my majors in college was fine arts. I’ve always been fascinated by how human beings use art to express themselves, and it was such fun to be able to write about my favorite Black artists in this book, through Theo’s eyes. Maybe it was a little bit self-indulgent, a way to get some thoughts about art off my chest.
What she wants us to sit with
The wealth that was never creditedThe novel’s corrective impulse is economic as much as moral. The thoroughbred industry that produced Lexington’s record-breaking career was built on the expertise of enslaved and formerly enslaved horsemen whose names rarely appeared in the race reports that celebrated the horse and his white owners.
I wanted to put a spotlight on the skills of these enslaved and formerly enslaved people, and on the injustice of the fact that so much wealth was created by them for white owners.
She has been direct about the audience she is trying to move. At the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, a Goodreads review calling the book “a white woman writing for white women” did not trouble her. She took it as an accurate description of the work an ally should be doing.
I don’t have to tell a Black person about the evils of slavery or the entrenchment of modern racism. They know it, they live it. But my readers, maybe a lot of them privileged, middle-aged white women like myself, maybe they haven’t had a chance to delve deeply into this history. [paraphrased from audio]
On the question of whether a white writer should have attempted this territory at all, she did not settle into comfortable uncertainty. She worked through the objection and arrived at a position.
I came to the conclusion that it was better to make the honest attempt than to leave the story untold. And, also, I feel like any attempt at empathy, no matter how imperfect it might be, shouldn’t be despised, because we need more attempts at empathy, not fewer.
The novel’s 2019 storyline, tracking Theo’s experiences alongside Jarret’s story from 1850, is where that argument becomes structural. The two timelines are not meant to rhyme neatly. They are meant to show that the distance between them is shorter than readers might want to believe.