Perfectly Themselves: Horses in the Human World

When Abby Letteri first encountered free-living horses, she realised that her whole life she’d been looking at horses without actually seeing them. Wild horses spend their lives building and maintaining social bonds, moving together in synchrony, their communication constant and subtle. In domestication, we isolate them – move them from paddock to stable to yard – separating them from their companions for our convenience, then find them fragile, anxious and difficult to handle.

An immersive and transporting memoir, Perfectly Themselves offers intimate portraits of horses living freely in the company of their own kind, from Aotearoa to the Outer Hebrides, Iceland and Mongolia. Underpinning Letteri’s research is a question sparked by a 33,000-year-old carved horse that seems alive with vitality and ease: what did we once know about horses that we have forgotten?

Part travel narrative, part intellectual inquiry and part personal reckoning, Perfectly Themselves challenges long-held assumptions about human–horse relationships, inviting readers into a more compassionate way of seeing them – not as objects of human desire, but as beings perfect in themselves.

'Endlessly illuminating and stunningly told, this book changes the way we see horses. With descriptive beauty and moral clarity, Abby Letteri sets out new ways of being alongside non-human lives. A profound work.’ —Damien Wilkins

‘The gift that Letteri shares in this book is the clear-eyed perspective of someone who has travelled far, studied deeply, and still retains her sense of wonder. A horse-mad girl who never lost her curiosity, never hardened into certainty, and who has created something that gently, but profoundly, has the power to change the world for horses.’ —Bonnie Mealand

‘I am delighted by how Letteri combines the hardened world of science with her own exploration, creating a work that embodies the journey of discovering our horses, and ourselves, all over again.’ —Emily Kieson

Abby Letteri is the author of down they forgot: a memoir (2021) and her poetry, stories, reviews and essays have appeared in various publications in the United States and New Zealand, including What She Wrote: An Anthology of Women’s Voices (2020), Turbine | Kapohau and the Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books. She has written for Concordia International Equestrian Magazine and the British Horse Society. Perfectly Themselves was completed as a PhD thesis at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Cover art: Julie Greig, Waiting for the Sun, St Bathans