PORT ANGELES — Molly Gloss’ novel is about heroes and desire, in the movies and in real life. And is it ever not for sissies.
Gloss, a writer of Westerns novels with a feminist conscience, will come to Port Angeles this Friday evening to give a reading at 7 p.m. from Falling from Horses, her brand-new tale of two young people in old Hollywood.
She didn’t have to include this town on her book tour, but she made sure to because of the response she got last time she rolled in to Port Angeles a few years ago.
“I was expecting 15 people, maybe,” Gloss said of that reading of her 2007 novel, The Hearts of Horses.
“Instead, the library was packed,” with about 100 fans.
So along with stops at the big bookstores in Portland, Ore.; Seattle; and Bellingham, Gloss will return to the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St., for her reading.
Admission is free, while copies of Gloss’ books will be available for purchase and signing.
Stunt rider
Falling from Horses is the story of Bud Frazer, a ranch kid from Oregon who takes the Greyhound bus to Los Angeles, where he finds work as a stunt rider in the movies.
Nothing’s easy nor glamorous: Bud sleeps in Griffith Park between running out of money and finding his first jobs.
Once he’s on board, what he sees — among horses and men — rocks him to the marrow.
Bud came of age in the woods and fields, helping his parents run cattle on a remote Oregon ranch.
Then his younger sister goes missing, and the tragedy that follows sends him away from the country, seeking what so many sought in the Western movies — aka horse operas — that Hollywood churned out through the Depression.
Finds a friend
On the way, he meets an unlikely friend, Lily Shaw, who becomes like family. Falling from Horses is her story, too; Lily got on that bus to Southern California to be a screenwriter.
Despite the sexism — which comes to vivid life in Falling’s chapters — Lily turns her hopes into reality.
She and Bud develop a friendship that far outlasts their youth.
Bud takes his mother to see one of Lily’s movies, “The Golden West.”
It’s about the dark side of cowboy mythology and the role cowboy heroes played in America’s fascination with violence.
Both mother and son are impressed, and Bud reflects on his friend’s grit.
“I had a teacher once who liked to tell us to grab our courage with both hands,” Bud says.
“At the time I thought this meant we shouldn’t cry when we were hurt. Cowboys never cry is what I thought she meant. But I think she must have meant Lily. Someone like Lily. Grabbing courage with both hands.”
As our narrator, Bud tells the tale of his and Lily’s trajectory.
When asked why she chose to write this novel from a young man’s vantage point, Gloss couldn’t really say.
“He just began to tell the story, and I listened to him,” she said.
Gloss researched and wrote Falling from Horses over about three years, driving from her place in Portland down U.S. Highway 99 to Hollywood.
There, she haunted Los Angeles’ Autry National Center, aka the Gene Autry Museum, and read books such as Lizzie Francke’s Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood.
Definition of hero
With this story, Gloss wanted to explore the definition of hero.
There’s the larger-than-life movie character kind, and there’s the ranch family, whose daughters and sons learn how to work with horses, cattle and the unrelenting forces of nature before they reach puberty.
“I hope [readers] will think about the difference between the genuine danger and violence that happens in ranching life and the concocted danger and violence of film, the unnecessary cruelty and violence of film,” she said.
The real cowboys and script girls of the West, Gloss believes, were the gutsy trailblazing kind.
“That’s what I wanted to shine a light on,” she said.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
