Half Broke: A Memoir

by Ginger Gaffney

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Author: Ginger Gaffney

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Hardcover:
ISBN 10: 1324003073
ISBN 13: 978-1324003076

A top-ranked horse trainer’s gorgeous, life-affirming memoir that offers profound insight into the fascinating ways both horses and humans seek relationships to survive.

At the start of this remarkable story of recovery, healing, and redemption, Ginger Gaffney answers a call to help retrain the troubled horses at an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico, a facility run entirely by the prisoners. The horses are scavenging through the dumpsters, kicking and running down the residents when they bring the trash out after meals. One horse is severely injured.

The horses and residents arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many: the horses are defensive and terrified, while the residents, some battling drug and alcohol addictions, are emotionally and physically shattered. With deep insight into how animals and humans communicate through posture, body language, and honesty of spirit, Gaffney walks us through her struggle to train the untrainable.

Gaffney peels away the layers of her own story―a solitary childhood, painful introversion, and a transformative connection with her first horse, a filly named Belle―and she, too, learns to trust people as much as she trusts horses. As her year-long odyssey builds toward a dramatic conclusion, the group experiences triumphs and failures, brave recoveries and relapses, as well as betrayals and moving stories of trust and belonging.

Resonant, smart, and beautifully written, Half Broke tears at the heart of what it takes to find wholeness after years of trauma and addiction and offers profound insight on how working with animals can satisfy our universal need for connection.

Review

“Gaffney has a breathtaking and at times nearly otherworldly ability to read horses by closely studying their bodies, and then to capture what she sees with her prose.”
- New York Times Book Review

“Ginger Gaffney writes the intricacies of the equine-human relationship as well as I have ever seen it written…She knows a horse’s mind as well as she knows her own. You will remember the tenacious and utterly winning people that populate Half Broke for a long, long time, and you will never forget the horses.”
- Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek

“Written with clarity and compassion, Half Broke is about the astounding power of horses to heal broken human beings. It shows a side of New Mexico that is seldom seen―the poverty and the struggle, but also the hopefulness and odd beauty of spirit within the people and the horses.”
- Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Ceremony

“Half Broke is a love song to the broken ones, be they human or beast, and all the ways they find to mend. Ginger Gaffney’s prose is as clean and lovely as the land she describes, and this story is one that hinges on some of the deepest truths. Among them the fact that loving well is the best medicine, and though we may not recover in a way that preserves the person we were, such loss is not without mercy.”
- Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

“Ginger Gaffney is a bold and original talent. This poignant, positive story of human and equine transformation subtly combines the author’s own healing with the challenge of teaching difficult people to work with deeply scared horses. The characters leap off the page and into your heart. Savor this book, and then buy a copy for your best friend.”
- Anne Hillerman, New York Times best-selling author of the Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito novels

“This book astonished, excited, enlightened, and humbled me. I loved it, loved it, loved it. This marvelous memoir, peopled with folks in serious trouble of one kind or another, and the horses they care for, creatures with their own sophisticated ways of communicating, taught me as much about language as have my seventy-seven years on the planet.”
- Abigail Thomas, New York Times best-selling author of What Comes Next and How to Like It

“In the pages of Half Broke is the rare gift of story exquisitely told, a book that shows us how to save ourselves by saving what we’ve left behind.”
- Nickole Brown, author of To Those Who Were Our First Gods

“Half Broke asks us to look at horses and ourselves in a new way. Gaffney’s vivid and engaging stories of 'teaching horses how to feel comfortable in the world of humans' inspires us, like the author, to 'love their world more.' A very moving book for all animal lovers from a true horse whisperer.”
- Brenda Peterson, author of Wolf Nation: The Life, Death, and Return of Wild American Wolves

“[A] powerful debut.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Fascinating. … [S]ome of the most compelling characters here don’t speak in words: they are horses. And in Gaffney’s story, they come alive”
- Deborah Hopkinson, BookPage

About the Author

Ginger Gaffney is a top-ranked horse trainer. She received an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and her work has been published in Tin House and Utne Reader. She lives in Velarde, New Mexico.

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Half Broke: A Memoir