End of the Rope

In the tradition of Cheryl Strayed's Wild , the story of a young climber's struggle to become strong and whole by testing herself on mountains and life.

It's hard not to love Jan Redford from the first pages of her gritty, often funny, and achingly honest memoir. As a young teenager she runs away from a cottage where her father has just put her down for the zillionth time and throws herself--teeny, scrawny and desperately angry--against a 100-foot cliff face. Somewhere in that shaky, outraged kid is a bedrock belief in her right to exist, which carries her safely to the top. There she feels a brief flash of victory and certainty--inspiring in her the desire to seek out more cliffs. And soon she sets her sights on not only becoming a climber but one of the world's few female mountain guides. In tantalizingly complex ways, the mountains save Jan and crush her, lift her up and kick her in the ass.

Falling in love with climbing eventually leads to falling in love with the climbers in her tight-knit western Canadian climbing community. Which can be complicated. It also means that the people she loves regularly vanish in an instant, caught in an avalanche or by a split second of inattention. You can't help but hurt with her when her boyfriend, the gifted climber Dan Guthrie, is killed, and wonder what would have happened if he'd survived. Instead of marrying Dan, Jan marries one of his best friends, a driven climber who was there for her when she was grieving, and becomes her husband and the father of her two children. Not what either of them planned.

End of the Rope is raw and real. Mountains challenge Jan, marriage almost annihilates her, and motherhood could have been the last straw...but it isn't. How she climbs out of the hole she digs for herself in the end, so her children will not have a mother who is angry, and feeling useless and dependent, is as thrilling and inspiring as any of her climbs--and just as much an act of bravery.