Blind Pony: As True A Story As I Can Tell by Samantha Hart is a memoir about growing up in America in the 1970s. Difficult to read at times, well written. #BlindPony #NetGalley

I really enjoyed getting to know Samantha Hart and her journey. I think it was an engaging read and I enjoyed going on this journey.

Thank you NetGalley for this eARC. I enjoyed this book but i also felt bad for this girl to travel so far and find out her dad was not who she thought she was. It was very sad at the same time.

I wouldn't want to be Samantha Hart but her troubled life makes for interesting reading thanks to her gift as a storyteller. We follow her from her unfortunate childhood to her wild adulthood.I did find her choppy writing style difficult to get into at first but I pushed on and am glad I did.

This is an emotional roller coaster of a book as you are invited in to Sam’s life, from early childhood, through adolescence and her adult years. A young girl who experiences all of the horrors every Mother dreads, from the physical and mental abuse she endures as a child, to the continued abusive relationships she encounters through her early adulthood. But Sam is a survivor and tells her story without seeking pity from the reader. A fascinating book but not for everyone. Recommended but only to those who can handle it.

I almost didn’t get into this book. At first, Sam Hart’s writing, in two or three sentence paragraphs, jarred me. I didn’t know if there would be a story, yet what she was saying in bits and pieces engaged my attention. I read some reviews – both positive and negative and decided to read on. Now, I cannot stop thinking about her life, covered her into her early thirties or so. And I think her way of telling it was just right. Much is made in the press around this book about Hart’s significant creative and financial success as a creative director and stylist, working and winning awards for films you would recognize. She had a knack early on for reorganizing rooms to a new and better look and styling her outfits from thrift store finds. This helped her with some rather surprising jobs and careers, as a teenager and well into her twenties. We do not learn of her later success in this book. But if she had never made it big at all, her jagged persistence in making a better life for herself and slowly making more good choices for herself, when she spent a lifetime of often having only lousy or worse choices, makes Sam’s story. She did not have to succeed in a conventional or big splash way to be a hero. She just had to figure out things adults did not teach her or model for her and live a safer life and a happier life. This isn’t an easy book to read because, like many people who have been abused as children, Sam needs to figure out how to survive pretty much on her own from her earliest years. There is much to respect in how well she managed, leaving one seriously abusive setting at fourteen for a less, but still abusive new setting. How do you grow up and find a way to live a stable life when you are fully on your own at fourteen and, for the next fifteen years living on the edge, vulnerable to predatory men, damaged men, and the drug scene. When most people in your life are emotionally detached and no one is a poster-child for living a sober, self-sustaining, calm, and interesting-in-a-good-way life and you need to be deceptive with most people, how do you become you? Sam has always known there is something more she wants. She travels a path that weaves in fits and starts, through drinking rum and cokes at fourteen with her con-man father; supporting herself to get through high school; falling in with men who house her for a time but do not connect emotionally; constant exposure to drug use; time as a backgammon champion; and posing for, then falling into business with a photographer who shoots for men’s magazines. Still, people like her and remember her and think she is pretty. Sam learns from each dead end, each fall into despair. It helps a lot that she is a people person, that some really horrible people also created opportunities for her and that here and there, some people cared for her and her welfare, without strings attached. Eventually, she gets to a more ordinary relationship where the things that go wrong are more familiar to many of us, at first happy, then sad, then angry, then over. But in a way that is so much more normal. During this time, she figures out more about family, connecting emotionally with people, and ending certain odd pretenses and deceptions. This is both a book about being alone in the world from birth and doing more than surviving. It is about having a compass that spins wildly and then heads true North. It is the story of imperfection and finding family and your authentic self.

“I still believed kindness existed in the world. I even felt today could be the day I would rise above my fears...If I could hold on to the belief that there was goodness in the world, I knew it would manifest in my life.” - Blind Pony.


This debut memoir follows Samantha Hart, who was originally named after her father’s affair, and grew up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania that had been no childhood idyll but rather a violent nightmare. At fourteen years old, she ran away in search of her father, a character she knew as Wild Bill. Discovering he wasn’t the hero she dreamt he’d be, she was on her own. Arriving in Los Angeles at the peak of LA’s decadence where money, drugs, and good times flowed, she floated through a strange new world of champagne-soaked parties, high-stakes backgammon tournaments, and a whirlwind of international escapades flogging nude photographs. When a wealthy playboy mistakes her accent for being British, it begins a spiral of lies leading Sam to question everything she thought she knew about herself and who she could be.

Thank you to both Samantha Hart and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. What I can say about this heartfelt memoir is that it blew me away! With her writing, Sam opens up about her heartbreaking past with vulnerability and strength. The writing itself is fantastic, engaging, and is deeply introspective. Sam tells her journey about growing up on a farm and facing abuse to when she is alone as an adolescent in the heart of Los Angeles and into her young-adult years. Some parts of this story were hard to read as Sam talks about sexual assault, drug addition, and even physical abuse. However, this is a beautifully written story about her own life, the lessons, and strength she found along the way. If you enjoy memoirs you must pick this book up!

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC of Blind Pony. I really enjoyed this memoir. It was well written and didn't jump around all over the place like some memoirs tend to do. Samantha Hart lived a thousand lives in such a short amount of time and it sounds like she persevered through the hard times and came out on top. It's nice to read a memoir about a strong woman who beat the odds. I would recommend this memoir.

A memoir of abuse compounded by more abuse. This woman's abuse began in childhood by her grandfather, witnessed and dismissed by her own mother (herself a victim of her father). Escaping the situation, she fled to LA and simply begat her own continuation of an abusive situations with men. They are chronicled in rapid succession here without much emotional depth. Very difficult read to read horrific details perfunctorily written with no end in sight. Did not finish the book.

What a great memoir, fun and poignant. This writer is an absolute delight. I cried with her through the tough times and cheered her on during the best ones. I highly recommend this one.

This book is fantastic. I had no idea who Samantha Hart was going into it, so I picked it on its content alone. Hart is an incredible story teller and a master of words. Your heart aches for her in the bad times and soars for her in the good times. This is a heavy read, but so easy to fall into and find that you've been reading for hours on end. Thank you to NetGalley and Samantha Hart for allowing me to read this book early!

Blind Pony follows the early life of the author who while living on her grandpa's farm in Pennsylvania is subjected to sexual abuse by her grandpa and a mother who chose to look the other way decides at the age of 14 to run away to live with her dysfunctional father. This leads her to getting work to survive in various places around the world and doing while being a teenager and there are sure interesting jobs but it surely fits with the time of the 1970's and she does these jobs literally around the world. You definitely see she is not worldly by the ways and individuals that take advantage of her. But through it all she shows grit and the will to learn and progress. This book is not action packed or a thriller but it draws you in to see how she progress in her right up to the end of the book. It still amazes me how messed up her parents were.
Give this book a read about true perseverance.

Blind Pony is Samantha Hart's story of her abusive childhood and her incredible adventures as a teenage runaway. Samantha was originally named Pammy Sue after her father's latest mistress when she was born, which is a hint as to quite how dysfunctional her family was, and after years of suffering the attentions of her grandfather,the denial and lack of love from her mother and the death of her beloved grandmother she leaves home at the age of 14. Her father,a charismatic man with a host of tall tales,has already left the family home. Also left behind was Princess, the pony her grandfather gave her who was blind in one eye while her sisters were given physically perfect ponies.

Lying about her age and often relying on the kindness of strangers and her intelligence Sam gets through school bur finds herself ,like many runaways, alone in the sleazy Hollywood of the early 1970's
From there her life is a roller-coaster ride of doing what she has to to survive, relationships with much older men purely to keep a roof over her head, parties with drugs on tap and flying around Europe trying to sell a portfolio of nude pictures to publishers of Men's magazines,all before the age of 18.
As she crashes through a life that seems to lift her up only for it to throw her to the floor again all she really wants is the love of her mother and answers to the question ,"why me?" as her abuse continues to play on her mind.
Samantha tells the story of her young life quite openly,the drugs,the sex,the ill-advised marriages until ending with her finding some kind of reconciliation, not least asking her grandfather why she got the "Blind Pony" of the title.
Samantha's book is hard-hitting and superbly written,she's obviously a very intelligent woman and ,hard as it must have been, leaves the reader in no doubt as to her feelings of abandonment ,isolation and even worthlessness because of the failings of others. By way of balance the kindness of strangers more than once helps her out of bad situations.

This is a great read and after finishing it I spent a couple of hours Googling Samantha, who went on to happiness in her personal life and a very successful in various creative industries, and others who feature in her story so it obviously left an impression.

Blind Pony is a heart-wrenching, engaging memoir that really keeps you reading. The book follows Sam's life from childhood that at times has magical qualities to other times devastating consequences to later in her adult life where she fights with the demons of her past to pave the way for a quite interesting life.

Hart's memoir is far more interesting than the synopsis and yet parts of her story aren't anything that is new but the way she writes it you feel very emotionally involved and wanting to know what happens. There were times I wanted to be like "why are you making this choice?" but then you remember her age and how young she was going through so many adult situations and it makes it so heart-wrenching to see that she is still a child living in a very adult world yet for someone all alone she is making it. The first part of the book is the hardest part to read because of the subject matter but is so important to her story. Once she moves to LA it gets wild. She gives lots of personality that makes you feel like you know certain subjects in her book well.

I did wonder what happened to a few of the people she encounters in her book, its not that we are owed it because she ties up her end with them it's more of a footnotes curiosity about where some of these people ended up or what their fate ended up being.

Hart has major talent and I like her voice. This is definitely a worthwhile memoir to check out.

Link to review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3858668192

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
This is quite the roller coaster ride the reader experiences while reading this book. The ups and downs of her life are pretty fascinating. Her courage and strength to overcome abuse and drugs is remarkable. The only thing lacking that I would've liked to read was more about her mom and see her side of things. Overall, this is well written and engaging.

Blind Pony is an account of Samantha Hart's life growing up in America in the early 1970s. It's the kind of book that has you constantly asking yourself, 'surely this isn't real, surely it's a work of fiction?'

Samantha has a troubled childhood - (initially named after the woman her Dad had an affair with) she is one of five sisters and her father is a drunk named Wild Bill who disappears from Sam's life in her early adolescent years. She lives with her large family and her grandparents on their farm - this is where she suffers the most horrendous abuse which takes place right in front of her mother's eyes.
Wild Bill is Sam's escape route to a better life and she leaves the farm to live with him. Sam's journey takes her places a teenager should never visit, she gambles, poses nude, drinks, and later succumbs to hard drugs.

The book is harrowing, sad, joyful, and happy, you'll definitely run a whole range of emotions reading it.
It is very well written and I was truly absorbed.