Skip to main content

Broken: A Love Story

by Lisa Jones

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 to bipolar 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.

BUY THE BOOK

BROKEN makes me proud to be who I am, a Northern Arapaho from the Wind River Reservation.

Sterling Charles BlindmanNorthern Arapaho

A great endeavor; a beautiful and powerful tale. I would treat myself to BROKEN, relishing the language, and like a woman with the best dark chocolate red chile fudge, I would savor its pages...I loved this book.

Winona LaDukeAnishinaabe activist and author of "All our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life" and "Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming"

The most important and beautiful book to come out of the West in a decade. Moving, powerful, humbling, beautifully rendered.

Alexandra FullerAuthor of "Don’t Let’s go to the Dogs Tonight"

BROKEN is about life loving us all equally and connecting us to spiritual responsibility. If you don’t read BROKEN, you are missing out!

Tiokasin GhosthorseHost of First Voices Indigenous Radio, WBAI, NY

I love this book. Broken is the record of a harrowing and ecstatic journey of mind, body and soul—so beautifully told that the reader is not just transfixed but
transformed.

Abigail ThomasAuthor of "A Three Dog Life and Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life"

Jones has a knack for describing events, people, and scenery so well that the reader can almost taste the weak, sugary coffee and feel the oppressive heat of the ceremonial sweat lodge.

Library Journal Review

Jones writes beautifully about the natural world, knows how to bring the people she encounters alive on the page and tells a gutsy, moving story about a significant passage in her own life.

The Washington Post

Many writers feel that they've done heroic duty in the course of researching and writing their books. But in Broken, Lisa Jones has gone the extra five hundred miles, and then some. This is a beautifully written, heart wrenching journey into the depths of the soul. A tale of mystery, courage, and love between men, women and horses.

Jim FergusAuthor of "One Thousand White Women" and "The Wild Girl"

A stunning accomplishment! With lyrical prose, Lisa Jones captures the wild beauty of the Wind River Reservation, the pathos and joy of the Arapahos who live there, and the remarkable life of a modern-day medicine man. All of this while on a healing journey into the broken places of her own heart. Broken: A Love Story is not to be missed.

Margaret CoelAuthor of "Blood Memory" and "The Silent Spirit"

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.”