"When God closes a door, he opens a window. But it's up to you to find it." So went the favorite saying of Lily Casey Smith, the indomitable frontier woman who is the protagonist of Half Broke Horses, a book penned by her granddaughter, Jeannette Walls. In Lily, Walls presents a picture of a woman for whom life is an adventure, and who was queen of the side-hustle two generations before the concept of a side hustle was even a thing. Lily grew up on a farm in Texas and learned how to break horses at the age of fifteen, which gave her the freedom to strike out on her own, ride across the country and take a job as a school teacher all by the age of sixteen. In later life, married, and raising two children, she operated a cattle farm in Arizona whilst supplementing the family income with bootlegging liquor and playing poker.
Half Broke Horses is considered to be a fictional memoir in that the author basis the story on the life of her grandmother, rather than on her own experiences, writing in the first person as if Lily herself was narrating. In 2005 she based her bestselling book The Glass Castle on her own childhood, a picture of glorious dysfunction that remained at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for over four hundred weeks and that sold over two million copies worldwide. Half Broke Horses was named one of the top ten books of 2015.
