It breaks your heart: How Geraldine Brooks turned her grief into a book of love – Sydney Morning Herald

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When I joined the Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet journalist in 1981, Geraldine Brooks was just ahead and already a dashing role model. While I measured up photographs with a ruler and pencil for the next days newspaper, she was paddling a raft down the Franklin River with the Australian Democrats leader, Don Chipp, and filing news stories that would help save the Tasmanian wilderness from a hydroelectric dam.

Back in the office, Brooks was easy to like, a gamine figure with a bubbling laugh, bottomless curiosity, and an appetite for fiery sambal and moral causes. Soon she was off again, swept by a scholarship to New Yorks Columbia University and marriage to American journalist Tony Horwitz into a life of adventure and homesickness. Shes been riding the rapids of success ever since, from war correspondent to international bestselling author, honoured with a Pulitzer Prize and the Order of Australia.

And here we are, women in our 60s, talking via Zoom between Sydney and Marthas Vineyard. Brooks is in the living room of her 18th-century hobbit house in an island village of Massachusetts. Her younger son, Bizu, is upstairs studying for his final school exams. Her chocolate labrador, Bear, is asleep under her feet and her mare, Valentine, is outside with a pasture mate, Screaming Hot Wings. Its her elder son Nathaniels 26th birthday and he calls from Boston, where he works as a biotech venture capitalist. (I cant say that with a straight face, Brooks says.)

There are always cracks in what looks like a perfect life. Horwitzs sudden death three years ago opened an abyss from which Brooks had to crawl to finish Horse, a novel infused with love, loss and shared history. Now theres a book to promote and Brooks, ever the trouper, reminds me her journalism career began not in glory but in cadet hell.

Geraldine Brooks only started riding at the age of 53.Credit:Randi Baird

Her first job at the Herald in 1979 was recording details of horses performances at Sydney racecourses. As well as enduring a fiesta of bum-pinching in the office, she got by on little sleep as she went on Fridays from the gallops to the trots to the last refuge of the desperate punter, the dogs and back on Saturday.

It wasnt reporting, she says. It was just taking down reams of information about every horse in every single race where they were at the turn, where they were at the finish, what the odds started at, what they went out to and you had to be very accurate, so it was very good training. I see that now from a distance, but at the time it was just a forced march. And the thing that was very disturbing to someone who loves animals was seeing how many horses got injured in the course of my time.

After three months, she hoped to move to some civilised bastion like letters [to the editor] but she was sent back for another three months. I thought I might have to quit. But I didnt, of course.

Why, she wondered, was her degree in politics and art history being wasted at the racetrack? The answer emerges in her sixth novel.

The horse was so sure-footed, we were cantering along cliff edges ... It was an exquisite experience.

Brooks has a knack for writing historical fiction that plugs into the zeitgeist and pumps blood into subjects that turn out to be timeless. She couldnt know that her first novel, Year of Wonders, about an English village devastated by plague, fear and superstition in 1665, would see a spike in sales after 20 years when COVID-19 caused a replay.

Horse imaginatively fills out the true stories of a famous 19th-century American racehorse, his black enslaved trainer and the artist who immortalised them in paintings, finding echoes in the fragile complexity of race relations in the United States today.

Geraldine Brooks during her reporting days at The Sydney Morning Herald and, right, the cover of her new novel Horse.Credit:Anton Cermak

Brooks had not ridden a horse until, at the age of 53, she attended a writers conference at a Santa Fe ranch, where a wrangler urged her on to an experienced mount that would not let her fall.

The next day I went with this gorgeous Cherokee guide on a gorgeous horse on a ride through the arroyos of New Mexico, and the horse was so sure-footed, we were cantering along cliff edges and it seemed completely unremarkable to me. It was an exquisite experience.

At home a friend offered her a horse for her five acres, she took riding lessons and became a devotee. So her ears twitched at a lunch when she heard a Smithsonian official talking about Lexington, the fastest racehorse of the 19th century and the countrys most prolific sire to winning horses. Neglected for decades in an attic of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, his skeleton had recently been restored and put on display at the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Kentucky.

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Brooks had just published her fourth novel, Calebs Crossing, based on the story of the first Native American to study at Harvard, and was wrestling with her fifth, The Secret Chord, a fictionalised life of the Bibles King David.

Impatient to write about Lexington, she says, I describe it as seeing the handsome guy across the room whos giving you the eye but you have to leave with the one what brung you The minute Horse moves in, like the handsome guy, he starts dropping his towels in the hall. Every project becomes less romantic and less easy once it moves in with you.

Horse took her back to the Civil War era of March, the novel that won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for a story inspired by Louisa May Alcotts Little Women and her fathers military service. After his racing career, Lexington also served bravely in the war that ended slavery. Then she learnt about the history of the black horsemen who were invisible but essential to the success of the racehorses that made white plantation owners wealthy.

Once you knew it, theres no way not to write about it, and once youre writing about it you cant write about racism in this country as though its something done and dusted and over.

Donald Trumps presidency brought racial inequality to the fore, fuelling the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump is not named in the novel but Brooks says: The thumping noise of the times really influenced the writing of the book it had to, I think. We had eight years of Obama and then we had Trump. Its just like we had Reconstruction and then we had Jim Crow. The country can only take so much change and then theres a backlash, and were living with the backlash.

Her narrative moves between 1850s Kentucky and Louisiana, 1950s New York, and 2019 Washington DC. She writes with affection about Lexington and Jarret, the young enslaved horse trainer, and gives voice to Thomas Scott, a real artist who often painted Lexington and unusually put black Jarret, his groom in a portrait. A century later, one painting reached the hands of Manhattan art dealer Martha Jackson.

Geraldine Brooks at work in her 18th-century hobbit house. Work offered solace following the death of her husband, Tony Horwitz.Credit:Randi Baird

In the contemporary story Theo, son of Nigerian diplomats, is an art historian who finds a painting of a horse among a neighbours garbage, and Australian-born Jess is a scientist working at the Smithsonian to identify the skeleton of a horse. Fate, of course, will bring them together in a complicated dance of forensics and attraction. Delicate ground for a white woman, Brooks knows, but she has watched her son Bizu, adopted from Ethiopia, navigate his way through American society.

In May 2019, halfway through writing the novel, Brooks received a phone call with the unimaginable news that Horwitz had collapsed on a Maryland street and died in hospital of cardiac arrest. He was 60 and on tour for his book Spying on the South, retracing the travels of Frederick Law Olmsted, who was an undercover reporter in the Antebellum South before becoming the designer of New Yorks Central Park.

Brooks could not write for a year, scrambling to work out aspects of their life that Horwitz had managed. She was helped by a friends advice, taken from US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Do your work. It wont be your best work, but it will be good work and it will be what saves you. COVID gave her solitude to finish Horse and grief added a minor chord. It breaks your heart open to make you more in tune with suffering, so I think that it does do something to how you portray your characters.

In their intertwined careers, Horwitz was the Civil War obsessive. His bestseller Confederates in the Attic was the first book that took him back to the South, and for some years the couple lived in rural Virginia, where a Union soldiers belt buckle found in their courtyard sparked her novel March. She wishes hed been able to analyse the Trump era after many conversations in bars with his supporters.

During research for Horse, Brooks had most fun on a road trip to Kentucky with Bizu and Horwitz, who was looking into Olmsteds work there and shared his knowledge of the archives. She also credits her funny, hard-working husband with spotting the link between Lexington and the Thomas Scott painting thrown on the street by a woman after her husbands death.

Brooks says its a privilege to live so close to nature.Credit:Randi Baird

We were so lucky until we werent, she says. My way of coping is to embrace the gratitude. The thing I miss most is the end of the day when he was walking across the lawn from the barn where he wrote with the laptop, and I would know the fun was about to start. We had the best time together. We would have loud raucous evenings arguing about the affairs of the day and laughing.

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Brooks remains enthusiastically Australian despite her dual citizenship and her American-born father (the intriguing subject of a memoir by her sister, Darleen Bungey). Clues to her attachment are scattered through Horse, with both Jess and Theo given Australian backgrounds, and a kelpie called Clancy modelled on her journalist friend Richard Glovers dog. She has an essay on author Tim Winton appearing soon. Once Bizu is at his US college, she wants to spend more time at her other hobbit house in inner-Sydney Balmain and beyond.

I just want to water my roots, she says.

And yet she loves the crooked wooden house she and Horwitz restored, on land bought by English settlers from the local Wampanoag people. She belongs deeply to her small, diverse, co- operative community, where people talk about catching the ferry to America. She has a garden to water there too.

As she prepares to leave on her publicity tour, to high praise from early American reviews of Horse, she says: Were just getting into the time of year when its fun to be outside as opposed to sheer agony. The flowers are busting out and everything is as green as Ireland suddenly. Weve got an old mill pond and a little stream through the property, so the frogs are coming out of hibernation and everything is coming back to life. Its a privilege to live so close to nature.

Horse is published by Hachette Australia on June 15.

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It breaks your heart: How Geraldine Brooks turned her grief into a book of love - Sydney Morning Herald