Broken: A Love Story

Front Cover
Simon and Schuster, May 12, 2009 - Biography & Autobiography - 288 pages
Writer Lisa Jones went to Wyoming for a four-day magazine assignment and came home four years later with a new life.

At a dusty corral on the Wind River Indian Reservation, she met Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho who seemed to transform everything around him. He gentled horses rather than breaking them by force. It was said that he could heal people of everything from cancer toÊbipolar disorder. He did all this from a wheelchair; he had been a quadriplegic for more than twenty years.

Intrigued, Lisa sat at Stanford's kitchen table and watched. She saw neighbors from the reservation and visitors from as far away as Holland bump up the dirt road to his battered modular home, seeking guidance and healing for what had broken in their lives. She followed him into the sweat lodge -- a framework of willow limbs covered with quilts -- where he used prayer and heat to shrink tumors and soothe agitated souls. Standing on his sun-blasted porch, pit bulls padding past her, she felt the vibration from thundering bands of Arabian horses that Stanford's young nephews brought to the ring to train.

And she listened to his story. Stanford spent his teenage years busting broncs, seducing girls, and dealing drugs. At twenty, he left the house for another night of partying. By morning, a violent accident had robbed him of his physical prowess and left in its place unwelcome spiritual powers -- an exchange so shocking that Stanford spent several years trying to kill himself. But eventually he surrendered to his new life and mysterious gifts.

Over the years Lisa was a frequent visitor to Stanford's place, the reservation and its people worked on her, exposing and healing the places where she, too, was broken.

Broken entwines her story with Stanford's, exploring powerful spirits, material poverty, spiritual wealth, friendship, violence, confusion, death, and above all else,"a love that comes before and after and above and below romantic love."

 

Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
14
Section 3
24
Section 4
28
Section 5
33
Section 6
45
Section 7
47
Section 8
63
Section 24
174
Section 25
176
Section 26
178
Section 27
183
Section 28
190
Section 29
192
Section 30
204
Section 31
206

Section 9
67
Section 10
73
Section 11
78
Section 12
82
Section 13
91
Section 14
102
Section 15
106
Section 16
111
Section 17
120
Section 18
122
Section 19
126
Section 20
145
Section 21
155
Section 22
163
Section 23
170
Section 32
213
Section 33
216
Section 34
219
Section 35
225
Section 36
230
Section 37
234
Section 38
245
Section 39
248
Section 40
251
Section 41
254
Section 42
258
Section 43
261
Section 44
263
Section 45
267
Copyright

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About the author (2009)

Lisa Jones lives in Colorado with her husband and two cats. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, High Country News, and National Public Radio. BROKEN is her first book.