Forget Me Not: A Memoir

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From the reviews -- and even, if taken out of context, a sentence or two in Krakauer's forward -- I had to assume this was some sort of angry or at least pitiable self portrait of a woman abandoned in life and death by her selfish climber husband. I'm glad I read this book, not just for its lovely writing and thoughtful narrative, but also for the quiet memory of its resilience.

I felt like it dropped off a bit in the last two chapters, but I am grateful for Jenni's vulnerability in writing a book like this.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

I read this book on Kindle and was glad that there were pictures to put a face to ones not familiar with. Jennifer got together and married Conrad (Alex's best friend and survivor of that fateful climb) less than a year after the accident and married him shortly after that. Rather than focusing on climbing, there was jealousy and constant tension: who was getting the most photos of themselves posted, who was getting credit for leading or summitting. Jenni lets the reader see and feel her grief (I shed a few tears), and her surprise as a romantic relationship develops with Alex's best friend, Conrad Anker. And despite this contradiction, I still felt that her narrative voice was unusually trusting in her readers, and all the lovelier for this.

It is her story of love with the late, great climber Alex Lowe, their journeys in climbing and raising a family, and his tragic death in an avalanche in the Himalaya. My takeaway is, their marriage happened to work because Jennifer also loved outdoor adventure and rock climbing when she was young and then had high tolerance for months away from Alex, i. Unfortunately – and I think this comes back to the quality of the writing – there wasn’t much self-reflection in this story.

This memoir by Jennifer Lowe-Anker is a tribute to her late husband, Alex Lowe, considered by many to be one of the best climbers in the world at the time of his death.She sells prints of her paintings to benefit the charities she and others have set up in Alex Lowe’s memory, and I have a couple of those hanging, framed in cowhide, in my own house.

They endured long separations so Alex could work as a professional climber while Jenni stayed home writing, painting, and raising their sons. For a couple with that big issue to overcome, though, they seem by Lowe-Anker's recounting to have had a deeper and more passionate relationship than a good number of couples whose relative lack of passion for life gives them more time together.

While it is absolutely tragic that Alex died so young, he was doing one of the two thing on earth that he loved the most. If you have read Into Thin Air, then this is probably a book you will like although I liked that book but not this one as much because of the characters. I could draw some parallels to Jenni and Alex's life as a couple and then a family with our own - balancing our desire to summit those beautiful mountains all over the world and also have a very normal life at other times, our desire to provide the best for our kids yet achieve our own dreams in the outdoors. Her work has been shown alongside such well known Western artists as Thom Ross, Howard Post, Larry Pirnie and Donna Howell Sickels.