Fair Girls and Grey Horses by Christine, Diana, and Josephine Pullein-Thompson

[rachelmanija]

The three Pullein-Thompson sisters wrote popular pony novels from the 1940s through the 1990s - about 200 of them total. They wrote separately, not collaboratively, and began when they were still teenagers. (Their mother also wrote pony books.) I've read and enjoyed some of their pony books, so I was excited to read their memoir. It's written in alternating sections by the three of them.

Normally I enjoy any memoir by anybody writing about specific details of life in any reasonably interesting time period and place. This book does have that, to some degree, and yet it largely fails to be interesting. Here is a sample from page 2:

James passed the Preliminary Cambridge University Theological Examination, probably as an external student, and in 1876 he married Emily Darbyshire and was appointed a literate deacon at Salford, Manchester. Four years later, after ordination, he became curate at St. Mary's, Manningham, Bradford. In 1883 he moved to London to become Associate Secretary of the Colonoal and Continental Church Society, and in 1886 he was appointed vicar of St. Stephen's, Bow.

It does get more interesting than that, but only intermittently. They went to boarding school with Joan Aiken, along with some other people who clearly were famous but whose names I did not recognize, but she only appears in a few paragraphs. Christine and Diana were twins, which is something I did not know, and Christine particularly felt that being a twin was very difficult and that she never really got a chance to develop her individuality. In the afterword she says that she continues to feel that way and at that point she must have been about eighty.

But you know what's missing? HORSES! That is, they do have horses, and horsey stuff is discussed, but not in the vivid, detailed, appealing manner of their fictional pony books.

I plowed through, though with some skimming, because I was curious about how they got to be professional writers as 18-year-olds right after World War II. Inexplicably, the book ends just as one of them is beginning to write her first book. Very frustrating.

Comments

[philomytha]

What a disappointment! Why would anyone read that if not for pages of hilarious and touching anecdotes about things their ponies did when they were children and how they used it as material?

[rachelmanija]

Right? I was absolutely baffled. No one cares about the great-great-uncle-cousin twelve removed who became an associate secretary!

[osprey_archer]

It ends BEFORE they're published? How frustrating! Surely the whole 18-year-old publishing phenom thing is exactly what the readers are here for.

[rachelmanija]

I bought it because I was interested in 1) PONIES and 2) three sisters who became publishing phenoms as teenagers.

I got neither.

[genarti]

What a bewildering failure to perceive the obvious audience appeal of your memoir -- especially from people who clearly were good at writing for audience appeal, if they wrote 200-odd books in a popular subgenre! (I might have wondered if they were just horse-obsessed enough for it to have been the genre of their hearts that they'd've written in no matter what, and it just happened to be popular enough to support the publication of 200-odd books, but in that case I can't imagine how they kept the ponies out of their memoirs either.)

[rachelmanija]

They do have ponies, but they're written about in such a boring way that's so different from their fictional ponies! Like, if they wrote a book where teenage girls start a riding school WHICH IS SOMETHING THEY ACTUALLY DID, it would be charming and very detailed, and the girls and ponies would have vivid personalities. The memoir version is "Then we needed money so we opened a riding school."

The whole memoir is just baffling.

[oursin]

How frantically annoying! - especially as I read somewhere about the father complaining about the overwhelming horsiness of the distaff side of the household...

I read a mystery by I think it was Josephine P-T and it was rather meh - I was expecting rather more equine-related shenanigans, even if it wasn't exactly Dick Francis.

[black_bentley]

What an odd place for it to end. I've still got books by all 3 Pullein-Thompson sisters, I absolutely loved them. Very disappointed by the lack of entertaining pony anecdotes :(((

[hilarita]

WTAF? I remember seeing Puellein-Thompson (mostly Josephine IIRC, but I'm crap at names) when I passed through my mad pony phase aged around 9 (and trying desperately hard to be a girl). I don't recall them being particularly inspiring books, but to find that their memoir is just fucking dull is very disappointing.

[ratcreature]

I guess the subtitle gives a warning that the memoir doesn't cover their whole lives, but what an odd choice to stop your memoir before the thing you are famous for actually happens.

[mildred_of_midgard]

A series of poor (and inexplicable) decisions!

[littlerhymes]

A memoir where you skip all the interesting parts... Interesting approach...

[yhlee]

My only hypothesis is that they were so desperately sick of writing engaging horsey books that they decided to take that all out.

[mrissa]

I totally get that memoir is not supposed to be as exhaustive as autobiography, but in that case it's supposed to be the interesting parts. This does not seem like a hard memo to expect to receive.

[movingfinger]

The intended audience perhaps was family, rather than the wider world. This sounds like a lot of things written to preserve memories for descendants.

I completely missed the pony/horse phase! I think our library didn't have more than a few. The only ones I knew of were set in upstate New York, I think, around a horse called Windy Foot.

[lirazel]

I am perplexed that I have never heard of them or their pony books? I wasn't hugely into horse books, but it still blows my mind that I never once came across them in the library....

Yeah, that memoir sounds...boring.