“When I read a memoir, I’m looking for answers,” says Susan Richards. “How do you do life? I get a piece of the puzzle from each one I read.”
The Bearsville resident’s third memoir, Saddled: How a Spirited Horse Reined Me in and Set Me Free (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), has some big horseshoes to fill: Richards’s 2006 debut Chosen By a Horse spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list. The story of her poignant relationship with a rescued racehorse named Lay Me Down, it was followed in 2008 by Chosen Forever. All this from a woman who didn’t give herself permission to write until age 45, when she took a workshop with Maureen Brady (“a saint”). Sitting in her sun-drenched study, surrounded by bookshelves, paintings, and pets—four mismatched dogs and a Siamese cat—Richards reflects that her father’s death offered “the freedom to do what I’d always wanted to do without fear of being ridiculed.”
It was a hard-won independence. When Richards was five years old, her mother died of leukemia. Her alcoholic father literally fled, leaving his two shell-shocked children to fend for themselves until they were scooped up and sent to live with a series of wealthy but uncaring relatives. When Richards’s older brother was packed off to boarding school, her sole emotional anchor was a cantankerous pony she loved without measure.
More than two decades later, Richards forged a healing bond with an equally unruly Morgan mare named Georgia; readers of Chosen By a Horse will remember her as the willful diva of Lay Me Down’s backyard herd. In Saddled, Richards circles back to tell Georgia’s story—and more of her own.
“I have a visual image whenever I write a book,” she explains. “For Chosen By a Horse, the image was a cracked heart. That’s what I was writing about—how it got cracked, how it became whole again. Anything that didn’t pertain to that, I discarded.”
For Saddled, the image was a horse walking down a path. “I spent the years between 30 and 40 getting sober,” Richards says. “Those were my biggest riding years. How I got and stayed sober was by doing that every day. When you have a passion for something outside yourself, it can save your ass.”
Richards started drinking in college, to alleviate social anxiety. “Nobody was happier at happy hour than I. By my third glass of white wine the hangover was gone, the shyness was gone, and I was brilliant,” she writes in Chosen By a Horse. “I was pretty and guys liked me. It didn’t hurt that I was as hard to pick up as a beer nut. I drank and laughed, gave expert advice on subjects I knew nothing about, danced in my underwear, and hoped everyone noticed how smart I was.”
This is vintage Richards: dry, self-effacing, and utterly frank. She brings the same clear-eyed honesty to the darker terrain of Saddled, which takes fearless inventory of a violent marriage that revolved around drinking, until the love of a horse prompted her to leave her husband and break the cycle.
“One day my life was one thing, the next it was something else,” she says. “I felt like it was the first time I was really alive and aware. It was like being born. That sounds dramatic and hyperbolic, but I suspect a lot of alcoholics would describe it the same way—it’s like being reborn into a new person. And that came about because of Georgia. I knew I had to change, or I wouldn’t be able to keep her.”
Richards initially resisted writing about alcoholism. But her editor tempted her with an advance, and she reluctantly swung herself into the saddle. “What I began to realize was that I could break it down into one ride at a time. I remembered that I used to get up every morning and ride, through having no job, then working as the editor of a local newspaper, then going back to school and becoming a social worker. I was becoming clearer as a human being, because I was sober, and I was becoming closer and closer to this animal. So, I thought, I’ll write about that.” She does, with an emotional candor she learned from her peers. “There are probably few places on earth where uncensored thoughts and feelings flow more freely than at an AA meeting,” she writes in Saddled. For someone who once “would have smiled through a stroke,” telling the unvarnished truth was both frightening and liberating.
Attentive readers may notice a few discrepancies between books. In Chosen By a Horse, Richards’s abusive ex-husband was a tennis pro living in Vermont. In Saddled, he’s a former Olympic ski racer, and their not-so-dream house is in the Adirondacks. “He was still alive when I wrote Chosen By a Horse, so I had to fictionalize,” Richards explains. “It was a privacy issue from a scary man.”
It wasn’t an issue the author had ever expected to face. Inspired by Brady’s class, she completed three novels, two of which she tried to publish. Though agents enthused over her work, none of them landed a sale. “I had been rejected for so many years, it was crazy depressing,” Richards admits. After hearing David Sedaris perform his autobiographical essays at Harvard, she decided to write something closer to home. Ninety days later, she’d completed a draft of Chosen By a Horse.
“I thought it was purely a journaling project. I absolutely didn’t believe there was a living person on Earth who wanted to read about anything that happened to Susan Richards,” she asserts. Acclaimed memoirist Laura Shaine Cunningham helped her edit the manuscript for submission. “She was an angel, so generous,” Richards recalls. “She was the first person to say ‘This is commercial, this can sell.’”
New Paltz-based agent Helen Zimmermann agreed. While meeting a SoHo Press editor about another project, Zimmermann mentioned that she’d just read a manuscript that made her cry. The editor said, “Send me that.”
SoHo’s advance for Chosen By a Horse was tiny, but “it felt huge to me,” says Richards. Her labor of love became the little memoir that could, meriting a Book Sense and Barnes & Noble Discover selection and vaulting onto the Times bestseller list.
“I still can’t believe it,” Richards marvels. But publication was just the beginning of her late-blooming Cinderella story. After a reading to benefit the Catskill Animal Sanctuary, a silver-haired man approached Richards, taking her face in his hands and praising her courage. He was Magnum photojournalist Dennis Stock, whose iconic images include James Dean on a misty Times Square and Louis Armstrong relaxing backstage. Their stop-and-go book-tour romance is the heart of Richards’s second memoir, Chosen Forever. Richards was flattered but wary as Stock wooed her patiently, finally winning her heart.
They were married in 2006, in the art-filled living room of their persimmon-orange Bearsville home. In a work of fiction, this might be the happily-ever-after ending, but life was less generous. Twenty years Richards’s senior, Stock had numerous medical issues, and late in 2009, a dormant cancer reemerged in inoperable form. He died on January 12 in Sarasota, Florida, the couple’s second home.
“Even though we were not together very long, he was such a huge part of my life. I’m not sure what it’s like living without Dennis yet,” Richards says simply. “I can take a nice drive with a friend, go for a walk with the dogs. But when I think about it, it doesn’t feel real yet. It doesn’t feel like I’m really living my life. My life is as Dennis Stock’s wife, and doing things with him and for him.”
Richards returned from Sarasota in February for the Woodstock Writers Festival, which she helped organize with co-founders Cunningham, Martha Frankel, and Abigail Thomas. “It was one of the most wonderful events I’ve ever participated in as a writer,” she says. “I went to nearly every event—I was as much a spectator as a participant. I loved Susan Orlean, Ruth Reichl, Shalom Auslander. I loved everything about it, and I hope we do it every year forever.”
Richards is currently “at the very beginning stages” of writing a novel. “It’s not in first person. Yippee!” she exults. She’s also written 100 pages of a new memoir, about caring for her husband during his final illness. “It was the beginning of the end, but I didn’t know that when I started. It was just about dealing with this very scary medical thing, the daily minutiae.” Richards is understandably reluctant to revisit those pages. “It’s too soon,” she says bluntly. “We were expecting a different ending.”
Her book tour for Saddled kicks off in Florida and meanders up the East Coast, ending in the Hudson Valley. She looks forward to reuniting with her dogs, who are staying with a housesitter while she’s on tour. But the first thing the author will see when she walks through her door is Georgia’s saddle, displayed like a sculpture in the entry hall. The tempestuous Morgan mare died in 2003, and Richards kept another horse for a year after that. She has not lived with horses since.
Does she miss it? “Yes and no. There’s a freedom in not having to get up and feed somebody twice a day, every day. But I talk about my horses all the time.” Richards smiles, quoting a line from one of her early novels: “Everything I know about people, I learned from a horse.”
Susan Richards will read at the Kingston Barnes & Noble on Tuesday, May 25 at 7pm and at the Book Cove in Pawling on Thursday, June 3 at 7pm.
This article appears in May 2010.
