rough magic riding the world's loneliest horse race

HM: I love this paragraph early on where you kind of fess up to the project of the book: Or like, ‘Why did I want to do this? Why did I want to put myself into this position?’ And it was horrible being alone and feeling neglected or self-neglected. So I did it once, I felt like the whole race had already happened. Riding one horse from A to B, 25 miles farther than I had ever ridden-that’s something I would have to do 25 times in a race. But I didn’t realize the race was going to be so horrible, actually. There’s also that part of me that doesn’t feel protective of my physical self, but is very protective of other parts of my inner psyche. It’s difficult because it’s a dangerous part of my personality that’s wrapped up in the potential for total lack of self-care. I really had this urge to explode myself out of everything, and so, with that impetus, the race just walked into the stencil that I was holding.

I was going to university in the autumn, so I couldn’t commit to anything proper, and the pattern of my friends and I to work and then travel just felt bizarrely self-serving and to no end. Lara Prior-Palmer: I was in a very constricted space in that year. What do you think it is about your life experience and your personality that compelled you first to do that, and more so to actually follow through?

Halimah Marcus: You signed up for the Derby, as you describe it, on a whim. We spoke in Electric Literature’s Brooklyn office when Lara Prior-Palmer was in town for her New York book launch. It’s about committing fully to what’s in front of you and the emotional, physical, and spiritual requirements of going all in. But the purpose of Prior-Palmer’s journey is less about the weight of the past then it is about the challenge of the present. Worthy projects, certainly, in memoir and in life. The most popular adventure stories, to which Rough Magic has been compared, are often structured around emotional obstacles-to grieve, to overcome, to escape. “Accidentally-or rather, fully intentionally,” she writes, phrasing that embodies the texture of Prior-Palmer’s storytelling: engaged, yet passive present, yet dreamy fierce, yet congenial. But the thrill of the story comes not from the fact that she won but how she did it. Six years have passed since her victory, secured at the audacious age of 19, during which she was able to write and publish a truly remarkable book. But it was turns of phrases like that, I quickly realized-surprising, playful, unexpected-that were going to make me love it. Prior-Palmer describes the Mongol Derby as “a perfect hodgepodge of Snakes and Ladders and the Tour de France on unknown bicycles.” As a former horseback rider with and adventurous streak (who also happens to appreciate the Tour de France), I was predisposed to enjoy this book.

Rough magic riding the world's loneliest horse race