In her new memoir A Light Through the Cracks: A Climber’s Story, Beth Rodden reveals that she is much more than her ability to climb the seemingly unclimbable. Yes, Rodden is a professional rock climber, and one of the only women in the world to have redpointed (led a climb without falling or putting weight on the rope) a 5.14c. (At the moment, the hardest climbs in the world, of which there are only a few, are 5.15d.) But she is also an excellent memoirist and a person who has learned from her life experiences (often harrowing) what it means to create a life that she actually loves — whether or not other people understand or approve.

Readers will be sucked in by A Light Through the Cracks which begins with an account of Rodden’s kidnapping and week-long hostage situation in Kyrgyzstan in 2000 when she was a 20-year-old pro rock climber. (Rodden skipped college to become a professional climber at the age of 18.) 

Rodden deftly weaves memories of her early life as a teenage climbing star struggling with an eating disorder, with details of the aftermath of her kidnapping. After Kyrgyzstan, she suffers from debilitating anxiety, untreated PTSD and ends up marrying her first boyfriend, fellow pro-climber Tommy Caldwell, with whom she was kidnapped. Deep down she knows she’s getting married for the wrong reasons and that she doesn’t feel about Tommy the way she should, but the pair have a complicated trauma bond. After terrorists had held them hostage for over a week, Tommy took matters into his own hands, and pushed one of their captors off a cliff, thus saving their lives. After this deadly act, he is afraid that no one will ever love him. Beth promises him that she always will. 

Beth Rodden

I had previously read Tommy Caldwell’s memoir, The Push. At first, I worried Rodden’s memoir was mostly covering the same events (the kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan) but as the book goes on it opens up in really lovely and complicated ways as her world expands from her myopic pursuit of athletic perfection to learning how to create a well-rounded adult life. 

Rodden is vulnerable and brave on these pages. She admits that she is often afraid while climbing. She writes that professional climbers are supposed to be fearless, but that she is not. To this day, she prefers to top rope, meaning that the rope is already set up through the anchor, rather than lead, in which the climber is the first to climb.  

Similarly, she describes her affair with a no-ropes, low height boulderer, Randy, who will later become her husband. Falling in love with him, while still married to Tommy, teaches her what love is supposed to feel like. But it also means betraying her best friend.

Rodden is castigated by the climbing community for leaving her husband for someone else. She and Tommy were a famous brand. How could she do it?

Eventually, she rebuilds her life and learns how to love well, eat well, foster meaningful friendships and even learn from setbacks and failures. In the end she finds the greatest meaning and purpose in the quiet moments that don’t put her on the cover of a magazine. In the last chapter Rodden writes, “If someone had told me in my twenties that I would feel more alive being a mom, or being in love, or having a day out with my girlfriends than I did while freeing a route on El Cap, I would have nodded and smiled and walked away thinking they had no idea what they were talking about. … I had treated myself like a robot for so long, thinking my discipline made me better than regular people … but If I wanted to have a big life, I needed to live a smaller one.” 

This is a book that will resonate with adrenaline junkies and weekend warriors but also with ordinary people of all stripes. How do we learn to forgive ourselves? How do we balance ambition with fulfillment? 

As a lifelong Coloradoan, I also enjoyed that more than half of the story takes place at various crags around our state — from Estes Park to the South Platte. And as a woman I found the friendship between Beth Rodden (Tommy’s ex) and Becca Caldwell (Tommy’s wife and the mother of his children) deeply moving. This is a story of outside physical adventure and the will to be the best, but it’s also a story of forgiveness, female friendship and second chances at how we do life.