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Written & performed by Sara Davidson - Abridged Fiction - Abridgment approved by Sara Davidson - 2 CASSETTES - 3 hours

Publisher, Harper Audio (February 1999)

On a whim, while working on the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Sara Davidson flies to Elko, Nevada, for a cowboy poetry festival. She has a chance meeting with an attractive, green-eyed cowboy from Arizona who makes bridles out of rawhide. At first she dismisses him as a jerk, an "insolent yokel," but months later, feeling at loose ends, she calls and invites him to visit for a weekend that alters the course of both their lives.

Having a fling with a cowboy is a common female fantasy, but for Sara and Zack the sexual fling deepens and intensifies. They try to resist it because they seem completely wrong for each other and don't fit into each other's lives. Sara writes books and television shows, studied at Berkley and Columbia and lives in a suburb with her two young children. Zack barely finished high school, doesn't read the newspaper and lives in a trailer in the desert. Yet after several weeks apart, they're compelled to see each other again.

Sara's children are charmed at first by the visiting cowboy, but when they realize he's going to stay around, they react with anger and vulnerability. Sara's friends and colleagues are skeptical, and she's forced to adjust her own ideas about who's a suitable partner.

"The affair has endured," she writes, "and it has taught me things I did not know about love, the body and the heart, the way we link ourselves to people who may not be politically or socially or in any way correct."

Sara faces a classic struggle between the mind and the heart, the worldly and the timeless, and between one's loyalty and devotion to children and one's physical needs as a woman. She understands she must find a way to yoke these conflicting needs or be grateful for the romantic interlude and walk ahead on her own.

The author, Sara Davidson, mailto:cowboybook@home.com, February 23, 1999
How I came to write 'Cowboy'.
What was happening? How could I be so driven, obsessed, besotted by sex? I was almost fifty, starting on the path toward what the literary lionesses -- Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette -- extolled as the third stage of a woman's life -- Triumphantly post-sexual. Not me. I was not going gentle down that path and I was flummoxed.

"I wrote this passage a few months after I'd leaped blindly into a romance that had no future. On a whim, I'd flown from my home in Los Angeles to a cowboy poetry festival in Elko, Nevada, where I'd met an attractive, green-eyed cowboy who practiced the nineteenth century craft of braiding rawhide into bridles. From the start, I dismissed him--and the affair--as ludicrous, impossible, laughable. I was a hard-working, driven, urban woman, dedicated to writing and trying to be super Mom. He was living in a trailer in the desert, doing something that seemed...whimsical, at best. He didn't read books or the newspaper. He didn't read! And books and literature were my passion. He was ten years younger than I, less successful and had no money, yet he possessed a talent for celebrating and making life an adventure. He was someone with whom I could be physical, childlike and playful. We both were starved for love and sex, and we were certain that in a short time, we would look at each other and have nothing to say and that would be that. Yet here we are, six years later. Cowboy is the story of this affair and how it affected my family, my work, my social life and my ideas about who's a suitable partner. The book is a hybrid--part memoir and part novel. It's about sexual renewal at midlife, about healing, and about how accepting someone's unconditional love can help us love ourselves. It's also about raising children, and the chaos that can erupt when you bring a new partner--in this case, one wearing a Stetson and cowboy boots--home to your kids."

About the Author: Sara Davidson captured America's imagination with her seminal account of life in the sixties, Loose Change. She has been called "the liveliest historian of her generation" by Malcolm Cowley. She was one of the first group that developed the craft of literary journalism, drawing on intimate material from her life and shaping it into a narrative that reads like fiction. Her articles have appeared in many magazines, including Mirabella, Harper's, Esquire, The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine. She is the author of three other books: Real Property, Friends of the Opposite Sex and Rock Hudson : His Story. She lives in Santa Monica, California.