A ghosted memoir: Half Broke Horses

It's not the kind of book I would ordinarily read and, as noted in yesterday's post, despite its self-definition as a "true-life novel," it's not really a novel at all, but still: I'm finding Jeanette Walls's "Half Broke Horses" to be very enjoyable to read and truly informative about a way of life in the American West much mythologized and no doubt long gone. She tells the story of her grandmother, raised on a very poor ranch, went off to Chicago to find her way, didn't, and returned to the Southwest to work as an itinerant school teacher in places so remote they couldn't get a college-educated teacher to take the job - then she marries and runs a ranch with her husband - book is filled with great stories, most told in just a page or two, about the episodes in her life - many tragic, some quite funny (her quips are especially funny: about a donut machine: Think how fortunate you are to live in a country where people don't have to make donuts by hand!). The book is really a ghosted memoir, but what makes it so special and unusual is that it's the story of one who would be unlikely and probably unable to tell the story (at least in book form) herself - so people like Lily Casey (Walls's grandmother and subject) lead these eventful, epochal lives and nobody gets to tell the tale. Here, Walls does so, preserving her grandmother for posterity and enabling us to understand her consciousness - which is one characteristic that memoir and novels do share.