Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles (1949). She came from a family of journalists, but when she was growing up, she loved horses. She read every book about horses she could find and invented imaginary horse farms. She grew to be six feet two as a teenager. She said, "I didn't want to be a writer when I was in high school; all I remember wanting to be was shorter." But she wrote her first novel as her senior thesis at college. She said, "My plan was to go to England and then sort of wander around the world, with my typewriter in one hand, my banjo in the other, and my backpack on my back."
Instead, she got married. She had two daughters before she published her first novel, but she made sure that she had at least three or four hours of babysitting every day so she could write. She had a list of four novels she planned to write: an epic, a tragedy, a comedy, and a romance.
She's best known for her novel A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear, set on an Iowa farm, told from the perspective of the daughters. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and its success enabled Smiley to quit teaching and fulfill her lifelong dream of owning thoroughbred horses.
After she bought a dozen horses, she wrote her novel Horse Heaven (2000) about the world of horse breeding and racing. It was one of the happiest periods of her life. She said, "When I was writing [my novel] about horses, it just added to my pleasure. I'd get up, read something about horses, then go feed the horses. I'd get rid of the children by sending them off to school, then I'd write about horses and read more about horses. Ride the horses, feed the horses again ... it was really wonderful."
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COLD FRONT
APRIL 18, 2005
When I was a young woman in Iowa, one quality I considered indispensable in a prospective mate was the willingness to drive to a coast. Over the years, there were trips to every conceivable coast, including Puget Sound, Niagara Falls, and Santa Barbara. Thus it was that, in January, 1984, when my daughters were five and a half years and fourteen months, it did not occur to me to worry about our journey by car all the way from Ames, Iowa, to the southern tip of Florida and then back up the coast to Sag Harbor. We just told several friends we were heading their way, threw some things into the back of the Chevy Cavalier wagon, and strapped the girls into their seats. We didn’t look at the weather report. Perhaps, therefore, we should not have been surprised when we were overtaken by sleet and snow an hour later and forced to stop far too soon at a Holiday Inn only a hundred miles or so from our house (twenty-nine hundred miles to go). When we got up in the morning and went out to the parking lot, the sun was suspiciously bright, but to us it seemed that Florida was just over the horizon.
There was snow all the way to Nashville, where we stayed with my uncle. In gratitude for his hospitality, my husband shovelled my uncle’s two-hundred-and-twenty-foot driveway. The neighbors came out to watch, and we soon discovered why—Nashvillians didn’t mind being snowed in, and, anyway, as soon as the sun came out in the morning the snow began to melt. But we were Iowans, and Florida was just over the horizon.
Crossing into northern Alabama, we admired the ice-covered trees, the graceful sweep of the highway through the hills, and the bright grass by the roadside that seemed to be strewn with shattered glass. We were alone on the highway with our snow tires. Not even road crews had come out with sand. We didn’t intend to be reckless—it simply never occurred to us to stop. At the end of a very long day, we reached Montgomery, where we pulled off into the parking lot of the first motel we saw.
Once we got some food, and unpacked a few things from the car, and visited with some friends who lived there, it was midnight. At this point, the fourteen-month-old decided that she was going to learn to walk. She staggered back and forth from one end of our motel room to the other for two hours, before falling over in her sleeper. Right about then, I noticed that the doors of the motel rooms kept slamming, and that lots of big semis were idling in the parking lot. We were up by six.
We smiled and made pleasant conjugal conversation. His job was to drive, and mine was to keep the peace. In the Florida Panhandle, we finally relaxed—no more snow. That was probably why the children started to fuss. It was also probably why he said, “Can’t you do something to shut them up?,” and why I took a bag of small wrapped soft candies out of the glove compartment and tossed them over the back of the seat to shouts of joyful disbelief. When I looked around, I saw it was the best game ever—unwrapping each piece and having the bliss of abundance melt in their mouths. I knew this stopgap offended him, though, so that’s probably why I said, “So, if something happened to both of us, who would they go to?”
He said, “My sister, of course.”
And I said, “Oh, not her. My—”
I don’t clearly remember that argument, except that it went on for five days and had many branches—down the sunny west coast of Florida (Me: “She’s twenty-two!” Him: “Her B.A. is in education!”), in low voices at my mother’s house (Him: “There’s something more going on here!” Me: “Why would you think that?”), through tight lips at his sister’s apartment in Boca Raton (Me: “They would never get to see my family!” Him: fraught silence), through a blinding rainstorm up the South Carolina coast (Me: “Yeah, right!” Him: “Say what you really think, I want to hear it”), and all through Washington, D.C., where we were supposed to stop for dinner with friends. We were getting along so badly by then that when he missed the exit I didn’t dare say anything. When I called my friend from a hotel in Trenton to apologize, she informed me that only two days before she had fallen down the stairs and broken her arm, but she had cooked dinner anyway. I apologized again. I didn’t try to explain; she didn’t have any kids. But years later, when she had two boys of her own, she said to me, “I was angry then, but I understand now. You were on a family vacation.”
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