Broken: A Love Story by Lisa Jones From Traci J. Macnamara

Broken: A Love Story by Lisa Jones

From Traci J. Macnamara

Scribner, May 2010

In Broken: A Love Story, Lisa Jones tells the incredible life story of a man named Stanford Addison, a quadriplegic Arapahoe who breaks-or rather gentles-wild horses. But Broken is as much about this author's journey through brokenness and healing as it is about Stanford Addison, the man who prompts it all.

Lisa travels to Wyoming for the first time to meet Stanford for a magazine assignment, but the landscape and its people draw her in, and she returns to them repeatedly over the next several years. From its beginnings in a dusty corral on the Wind River Indian Reservation, Lisa's four-day magazine assignment becomes a life-changing affair with a person and a place.

Although Lisa is committed to a long-term relationship with her boyfriend who's exploring whether or not he wants to become a Buddhist monk, she's drawn to Stanford and curious about his supernatural gifts. Sitting in his electric wheelchair, he talks city folk and farm hands alike through the process of taming horses without using physical force. And he's credited with curing people of afflictions ranging from bipolar disorder to cancer.

These mysterious spiritual powers came to Stanford Addison shortly after he survived a car accident that crippled him at the age of 20. Up until that time in his life, he had lived a reckless youth busting broncos, womanizing, and partying. In an instant, all of that changed. Stanford and his friends sped down a road one night on the way to a party and hit a pack of loose horses. The truck rolled three times and came to a halt with Stanford pinned underneath the cab. His friends walked away unharmed, but he would never walk again.

Stanford's transformation from a "rageful, suicidal young quadriplegic to someone who healed people, physically and spiritually" didn't occur over night. It took about twelve years from the time he first experienced the presence of a spirit in his hospital room to the time that he had honed his gifts enough to help others. Through the help of mentors and other spiritual guides such as his medicine-man uncle, Addison learned to lead others in spiritual practices such as sweat lodges and smudgings.

When Lisa first encounters this man, the journalist side of her relates to him as a detached observer. She's there to take notes and write down interesting details for her article. But when Lisa starts making regular visits to Stanford's ranch after her assignment is complete, her spiritual transformation begins. Stanford exposes they way she's been broken by holding grudges against her family and loved ones, the ways she's afraid to trust and commit to others, all the places where her inner life is fragile and fractured. And then he teaches her how to heal.

Stanford Addison is the primary catalyst in Lisa's spiritual renewal, but the Wyoming landscape and a host of other characters also set the backdrop for this powerful process. Moses, a cowboy with a badly scarred face, and Stanford's extended family accept Lisa into their inner circle and show her "the rock-bottom truth so often obscured from the white middle class: Life doesn't do a damn thing you think it will do."

Lisa Jones expertly weaves personal insights into her story of Stanford's life, and she tells startling-often heartbreaking-stories to explore difficult themes such as racism, poverty, and death. In this way, Broken becomes much more than the story of one man's life. It's the story of how people connect to-or break from-each other, how through our relationships with others we may experience healing and, ultimately, love.

In the end, Lisa Jones has written a powerful love story, whether or not that's what she set out to do. It's unexpected that so much love can come from such broken people, from such a broken place. But as she says at the beginning of this book: "The thing is, not only horses get broken around here. Everything does, starting with the ground itself."

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/memoir/fr/Broken.htm?nl=1