'The book models its own difficult hopefulness.' Damien Wilkins on Perfectly Themselves by Abby Letteri

 

On Tuesday 8 September 2026, we gathered at Unity Books Wellington to celebrate the publication of Abby Letteri's new book, Perfectly Themselves: Horses in the Human World. Here is Damien Wilkins' launch speech from the evening.

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What a thrill to have this book in our hands! I’m so pleased for you Abby and so excited that all these new readers will get to immerse themselves in a work which you’ve poured your heart and soul into. It really is a tremendous achievement. 

I think it’s the first book I’ve read in which the narrator says about another figure that she has had to ‘listen to his gut and read the tea leaves of his manure.’ Yes, we might sometimes be in the higher realms of poetic feeling in this work—Abby gloriously describes the sheer beauty of animals in motion across a desert—but we are also deep inside the digestive tract. And Abby is here to tell us about sinus infections, gastric ulcers, the sensitivity of a horse’s whiskers, the tell of its tail. 

I was lucky enough to be one of Abby’s PhD supervisors alongside Babette Puetz, and what can happen in that setting is you sort of lose sight of what’s coming into being and you’re just focussed on small stuff, deadlines and abstracts and referencing, all the academic process. You can’t see the wood for the trees, you can’t see the horses for the hooves. And now reading it as this radiant production, I feel the full weight of what Abby has written. It’s also great to see the endorsements from people who know horses very well and now the superb reviews are coming in—and the sense is growing that this book is a game-changer for how we might consider relating to horses and for how we might write about animals.

The book is substantial in so many ways. It’s nice and heavy for starters. A beautiful hardback, full of striking colour photos. But it’s also substantial in that it represents years of hard thinking, wide and deep reading, intrepid travel. This inquiry might start close to home, in Ōtaki Falls, but it takes us all over, to Iceland and Mongolia, to Italy and the Outer Hebrides. The book also takes in years of living which was sometimes painful, sometimes joyful. In these pages Abby must deal with the ravages of an autoimmune condition but then we get to follow her out of those dark woods and into these astonishing places in search of a view of horses which might unlock a fresh sense of a freer life, both for animal and writer.  

And because this is a book and not just an experiment in living alongside horses, this project takes in years of trying to find a language and a literary form—you’ve got to get the words right—words adequate to this extraordinary task Abby set herself of trying to know horses away from coercion and control, to get close to how the horse might experience not only us—its humans—but itself. Not only asking, ‘What does this horse need? But also, what gives this horse pleasure?’ As Abby says of horses, ‘They have a mind that minds about things.’ 

I think of Perfectly Themselves as a devotional book. I mean it’s a story of Abby’s devotion to horses. But it’s also about devotion—how slowing right down and paying the closest attention to the world around us, might actually be a pretty good approach to take, even if there are no horses to be seen at all. As the book points out, like the horse, we are also social mammals. Our isolation from one another is a harm. 

I do need to step carefully here however since Abby was very strict with herself in her determination not to write another book about a woman who is saved by her horse, who gets better through some deep communion, with the horse reduced to the role of agent. Centre the horse! was a mantra. Remain alert to the horse’s communications, free the animal from our agendas. Abby the activist. Yes, yes. The status quo won’t do.  But as we read we also see that the writer is powerless against the affective power of the horses she cares for, or simply hangs out with, or which she just observes from afar. And the book, while it’s telling us not to fall into the trap of sentimentality and over-identification, is also punctuated by these lovely moments almost of ambush, where Abby, the rigorous equine ethnologist, is utterly undone by some encounter with these animals. As a non-horse person myself, this is what gives the book its wider appeal. 

And she’s not shy of the word ‘love’. She writes of her horse Chico: ‘I am trying to love him by learning what matters to him. By offering conversation we can both understand. I am trying to love him without interrupting.’ I asked Abby a question about loving her horses in our session at Te Papa yesterday and, characteristically, she turned it around and said, ‘I’m more interested in learning about how horses love’, and she spoke about proximity, how a horse will close the gap between itself and another horse and sometimes a human. Proximity is such a good word—it doesn’t over-promise, it puts nearness in the picture but also its opposite. 

You know five years ago I launched Abby’s superb short memoir which focussed on her life growing up in America and her parents and those troubled teenage years of disconnection and drift. And I was looking at Abby’s bio note online and it traces this move from someone who is publishing poetry and essays in literary journals to this person we have now, so we go from the Liberty Hill Poetry Review, Turbine and the Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books to the Concordia International Equestrian Magazine and the British Horse Society. And we think, gosh that’s a leap of showjumping proportions. But then thinking about the new book and the memoir, I did just want to make a connection between them and between these two apparently distinct Abbys. 

I remember the memoir’s potency came about not through confessional overload—the writer spilling her guts—but through necessary restraint, and the questions which restraint provokes. In that earlier book the questions were, can children ever really understand their parents? How can we make a useful non-damaging account of each other given how partial our views into each other remain? The writing was always looking at limits, and at how our desire to know, to know it all, can get in the way of things. People, Abby seemed to be saying, are mysterious, though we should not give up on guessing about them. 

There are portraits in this new book of horses Abby has cared for, which carry that same quality. ‘I have no idea what that horse’s testiness is about but here’s my best guess.’ This book, Perfectly Themselves, is also about limits. The limits of cross-species understanding. Against the bleakness of limits, Abby offers realistic hopes about understanding and connection, loving without interrupting. I’m not quite saying that when Abby writes about a pony on Eriskay, it’s exactly the same as when she was writing about her mother, that her mother is as unknowable as a pony in the Outer Hebrides. But the tenderness and the caution and the reaching are there in both portraits.

One other thing. When you buy the book, you’ll see it falls into these fairly short sections with headings. The memoir was similarly structured. It makes it a very crisp and inviting reading experience. Dip in anywhere and you’ll find some elegant insight, some provocative refection. As well as that, I think it encourages a certain kind of reading. Read this bit and stop and reflect. Honour the pause, as a director will tell an actor. 

I also think Abby favours fragments because the sort of hesitancy implied in the form is a great match for her subject and her own temperament. ‘I can say this much and then I need to stop.’ The horses, as this book brilliantly suggests, have their own rich (and richly elusive) vocabulary. Abby writes that she is trying to hear what they’re saying and figuring out what she can say back. She tries, fails, tries again. In these brief titled passages we hear that effort, the stopping, starting again, renewing itself each time. 

In this way she helps us see the autonomy of an animal—the identity still in flight—but also its sociality and its interdependence, the grounded mammal. In that movement of separateness and togetherness we begin to see how both aspects might hold, must hold even, in the most sustainable and sustaining relationships. The book models its own difficult hopefulness. Having read it, I don’t want to have a horse or ride a horse. I don’t want to read the tea leaves of their manure. But now when I see a horse, I see more. I see better. Abby offers us that gift. And as well as being a book about horses, this is also a wonderful work about learning, its uneven pace, its wrong turns, its glorious openings.

Lisa Adler and Abby Letteri.