“When I began it, I saw that the story didn’t begin with her at all, but further back. I decided to begin it, for now, with the dog.”
“And the dog died, and all my stories with him…”
Emily Haworth-Booth’s Mare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2026) is the type of book that will rip the skin of certain readers, each word another tiny cut; I’m still bleeding. It’s not about a horse – it’s about a woman who can’t do the single thing women are supposed to do. And if you’ve struggled with infertility, you’ll likely feel like Haworth-Booth found your deep, secret thoughts and took them horseback riding.
I am childless by circumstance not choice, like our narrator. I had two “not-my-daughters,” like our narrator. (And their abrupt departure from my life still stings, but that’s another story for another time.) And much like our narrator, I’ve put significant maternal energy into animals – often insisting on having more than one dog because I know just how rootless I would become should they be absent from me. And that’s how our novel opens, a childless woman whose dog has just died learning she will never have children. Haworth-Booth’s first novel is a knife – that carries my reflection and blood along with countless others. Too personal. Too close. Too taboo a topic. Such fantastic writing on the things we don’t talk about. Such a tender and human take.
As mentioned, our narrator has just learned she can’t have children; her body has launched her into early menopause. Her dog has died. She revisits a childhood passion and enters into a horse “share” at a barn not far from her. The childhood passion quickly becomes an adult obsession – not with horses, but with that horse. An author of children’s books, she’s found she’s lost the words and the only purpose and meaning she has found is tied to this horse that belongs to someone else. Meanwhile, her mom keeps forwarding her monthly blog entries from a woman writing about how freeing being childless is. Fake it until you make it, right?
I don’t see both this and Our Numbered Bones on the longlist, but I could see one or the other. They are very similar in concept, quite different in delivery. But both have excellent delivery that leaves a mark.
A Girl Named Tommi 