true enough

on westerns, love, and learning to make do

This essay first ran in The Books that Made Us over a year ago. I’ve fussed with it ever since. Here’s the version that feels right…today.

Over the last few years, I’ve developed a somewhat uncomfortable attachment to the American West and its lacquered mythology. I’m not entirely sure why it’s rearing its head now, but I know where the roots lie.

Growing up, with both of my parents working full-time, I was often in the care of my beloved paternal grandparents, Grannie and Pop. And while they changed my life in ways that words can’t fully express, I can tell you this: their refusal to watch anything besides the Game Show Network (hence my obsession with Arlene Francis) or the Westerns Channel (I might be the only person alive who’s seen every episode of Gunsmoke and still can’t tell you the plot) had a profound, if unexpected, impact on me.

As a kid, I hated Westerns. Maybe simply because Pop loved them. That oppositional streak still flares up in me sometimes. I couldn’t understand what drew him in, what kept him returning to the same sooty stories. I always preferred the buzzy lightness of game shows. Westerns felt too solemn.

But Pop? I think Pop saw himself as a cowboy. I never once saw him in shoes that weren’t boots. Most days, he wore a tan, dented-crown cattleman hat, perched just so. I can see him clearly: long-sleeved plaid shirt (despite the harshness of Louisiana weather), tucked into his Wranglers with that ostrich belt. And after 4 p.m., when he turned in for the day, I lost control of the television. No more What’s My Line? or To Tell the Truth for me. I was one bitter five-year-old.

Pop was obsessed with Westerns, and I’m obsessed with the safety and comfort the memory of him brings me. And so many of those memories — quiet afternoons, the whirr of a box fan — star James Arness and Amanda Blake. I suppose I’m obsessed with Westerns too, whether I want to be or not.

But I think Westerns, as a genre, are messy. They often erase as much as they entertain. There’s a lot buried beneath the gun smoke: the destruction of Native American peoples, cultures, and languages; broken promises; greed disguised as bravery. The so-called frontier was a brutal place, and the stories we tell about it don’t always reflect who paid the highest price.

It’s a strange thought, loving a time and place soaked in such pain. But that’s what Westerns ask of us, isn’t it? Even so, I can’t let them go. Because tangled up in all that ache is the memory of my grandfather’s boots by the door.

Can a story hold violence in its truth and tenderness in its memory? I want to believe it can. I think I already do.

///

As a teen, I decided to read Charles Portis’ novel True Grit for a class assignment. Looking at the copy now, I’m sure I picked it because it’s short. But there’s no doubt Pop’s love of the movie drew me to it.

True Grit was originally published as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post. The story is told from the perspective of an aging Mattie Ross, recounting her father’s death and her journey for retribution at the tender age of fourteen. In need of a U.S. Marshal, Mattie seeks out the meanest, Rooster Cogburn, a man with seemingly untamed passion and perseverance.

It’s a revenge story, and a simple one at that. What sets it apart is the style in which it is written. It’s funny but not exaggerated. It never over-moralizes. It distinguishes itself from more formulaic revenge tales through its vivid narration and quietly layered style.

It took me several days to read because I kept stopping to savor what I’d just absorbed. Every sentence lands squarely. It’s a masterclass in authenticity and understated emotional depth.

This distinction matters because True Grit exists within a genre that has shaped American identity in profound ways. The American West, and its depiction, has an outsized effect on our national character, especially regarding notions of rugged individuality, personal freedoms, and the role of government. Truthfully, the “winning” of the West was an exceedingly rough period marked by violence and betrayal. The moral ambiguities of this conquest are difficult to rationalize. Seemingly in response, writers and filmmakers have coated “the Old West” in romanticism.

The funny thing about True Grit is that it is not really a part of that conversation. Neither Mattie nor Cogburn are interested in these things. For them, the world is small and everything is personal.

And yet True Grit doesn’t idealize the West either. Mattie and Cogburn’s journey is unforgiving. Still love and optimism push up from the pages — not in spite of the hardness, but because of it. What True Grit makes plain, and what so many other Westerns ignore, is that nobody survives alone. Mattie might have the will, but she needs Cogburn. And he, despite his bravado, clearly needs her too. There’s grit, of course, but there’s also interdependence. And it’s not treated as weakness.

I’ve grown increasingly suspicious of the cowboy archetype: the loner who answers to no one and rides off into the sunset without ever asking for help. I don’t buy it. We need each other. We always have. The most radical part of True Grit may just be its quiet insistence that connection — unlikely, unruly, maybe even uncomfortable — is what carries us through.

That connection is, in its own way, a love story. Not romantic, but something harder to name, shaped by stubbornness and rarely spoken aloud. Mattie’s sometimes dour personality and lack of any reasonable sense of self-preservation turn a potentially sorrowful story into pure comedy. And yet it is also about the love of a daughter desperately seeking to avenge the father she lost. But the real love story is the collision of the formidable Cogburn with Mattie. Love has many faces. Cogburn is not an ideal role model for anyone, and yet he’s all that she has. And life is nothing if not a perpetual test to see if we can make do with what we have.

///

Reading True Grit helped me understand something about the stories we choose to love, and the people who first showed them to us.

I think Pop saw himself in Rooster Cogburn. He could certainly be gruff and no-nonsense, an endearing curmudgeon. And maybe we both hoped that I was Mattie Ross. She is as salty, sure, and unapologetic as I’d like to be. And maybe I am…at least sometimes. However, the reality is that my grandfather wasn’t Cogburn. No, he was far gentler; he was my Augustus McCrae. And despite my longing for brashness, I don’t know that there is much of Mattie within me. I often feel meek and afraid. But I now see so clearly why Pop loved this story, these characters. It’s the only Western I’ve read or watched that left me feeling something close to peace. But I also walked away feeling inspired and envious of the characters. The good kind of envy that comes from seeing someone really live. I want to move toward something, anything, as doggedly as Mattie and as skillfully as Cogburn.

I return to True Grit more than I ever expected to. Not because I want to inhabit the world, but because it feels like a way back to Pop. A familiar rhythm. A certain cadence of speech. A young woman trying. A man softening. Two people fumbling toward something like love or understanding, even if they never say the words aloud…

Last Friday night, I rewatched Tombstone alone in my apartment (RIP Val Kilmer), and for a flickering moment, I think I finally saw what Pop saw. That pang for something unshakable. A story that feels bigger than you but also, somehow, like home.

I didn’t always understand what drew him to those dusty landscapes. Maybe I still don’t. But I understand him better now. I understand what it means to find comfort in this hard world, a world where you survive not because you’re the strongest, but because someone rides with you.

Because love, in the end, doesn’t always look like tenderness. Sometimes it looks like getting back on the horse. Like carrying someone through life’s seasons and never saying a word about it.

If you made it this far, click that itty-bitty digital organ! ❤️