THIS BOOK WAS ORIGINALLY
meant to be about my mother’s childhood growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. But as I talked to Mom about those years, she kept insisting that her mother was the one who had led the truly interesting life and that the book should be about Lily.
My grandmother was—and I say this with all due respect—quite a character. However, at first I resisted writing about her. While I had been close to her as a child, she died when I was eight, and most of what I knew about her came secondhand.
Still, I’d been hearing the stories about Lily Casey Smith all my life, stories she told over and over to my mother, who told them to me. Lily was a spirited woman, a passionate teacher and talker who explained in great detail what had happened to her, why it had happened, what she’d done about it, and what she’d learned from it, all with the idea of imparting life lessons to my mother. My mother—who struggles to remember my phone number—has an astonishing recall for details about her mother and father and about their parents as well as an amazing knowledge of the history and geology of Arizona. She never once told me something, whether about the Havasupai tribe or the Mogollon Rim, slaughtering cattle or breaking horses, that I could not confirm.
While interviewing my mother and other family members, I came across a couple of books about her paternal grandfather and maternal great-grandfather that confirmed some of the family stories:
Major Lot Smith, Mormon Raider
, by Ivan Barrett, and
Robert Casey and the Ranch on the Rio Hondo
, by James Shinkle.
Although those books substantiated certain events, such as the murder of Robert Casey and his children’s feud over the herd, they contradicted others. Shinkle noted that while researching his book, he came across conflicting versions of events and was frequently unable to get to the ultimate truth. In telling my grandmother’s story, I never aspired to that sort of historical accuracy. I saw the book more in the vein of an oral history, a retelling of stories handed down by my family through the years, and undertaken with the storyteller’s traditional liberties.
I wrote the story in the first person because I wanted to capture Lily’s distinctive voice, which I clearly recall. At the time I didn’t think of the book as fiction. Lily Casey Smith was a very real woman, and to say that I created her or the events of her life is giving me more credit than I’m due. However, since I don’t have the words from Lily herself, and since I have also drawn on my imagination to fill in details that are hazy or missing—and I’ve changed a few names to protect people’s privacy— the only honest thing to do is call the book a novel.
JEANNETTE WALLS
was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and grew up in the Southwest and in Welch, West Virginia. She graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York City for twenty years. Her award-winning memoir,
The Glass Castle
, is an international bestseller and has been translated into twenty-three languages. She is married to writer John Taylor and lives in Virginia.