Shelley Dark, author of the best seller Hydra in Winter gave me a boost to the spirits with her glowing review for Elvis and Me.
I know Gillian Wills and I love her sense of the comic, particularly her willingness to turn it on herself. She is an extraordinarily accomplished woman in the world of music, confident and knowledgeable, yet entirely without the need to remind you of it.
Which makes Elvis and Me such a joy.
Here is a woman who falls hopelessly in love with an emaciated, damaged ex-racehorse who is completely inappropriate for someone who barely knows one end of the horse from the other. Sensible? Not remotely.
What follows is not a heavy-handed memoir determined to convince us that one damaged soul rescued another. It is much more interesting than that. Gillian enters a world she knows very little about and we see, with her wonderful ability to capture people almost like a literary caricaturist, the trainers, riders, horse people and assorted others who help her with Elvis.
Through it all there is Elvis himself, difficult, unpredictable and increasingly impossible not to care about.
The business of starting again is a theme that runs through everything I love to read and, I confess, everything I write myself: of finding out who you are once the old scaffolding—a childhood, a career, a marriage, a sense of certainty—has been taken away. Gillian and Elvis are both mid-reinvention, and neither makes it look easy.
I particularly loved Gillian’s self-deprecation for she never casts herself as the heroine of her own story. Quite the opposite.
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Here are links to Elvis in case you would like to share a few words.