Forget Me Not: A Memoir

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Being married to the alpinist Alex Lowe, she tells first hand of what life is like for the ones who are left behind when one leaves for the high ranges of the world.

I am just over halfway done, and perhaps when I finish, I will have a better taste in my mouth for Alex, who this book is written for. Then eventually it grows into something blazing, which fixated me, and I was unable to step away from it.I was simply overwhelmed (in a good way) by Jennifer's captivating voice, her beautifully descriptive passages of the beauty in her surroundings, her meticulous record-keeping to reconstruct the past, and her frank, introspective view of the meaning of it all.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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.She lives in Bozeman, MT with her husband, Conrad Anker and their three children-Max, Sam and Isaac. I became interested in their story when I saw documentaries about Lowe and Conrad Anker (Lowe's best friend). I felt that Lowe-Anker's narrative voice was one of the book's great strengths; the other was her artist's eye for description. There are parts of this book where you will feel the loneliness Jen feels as well as the times where you will smile along with the charactors in the story.

I'm so proud of Jen, for her zeal to overcome loss even after she loses other climbers to mountains or when her mother and sister succumb to cancer. She is a serious climber herself (or was; as she states, parenthood increased her drive for self preservation), and she conveys clearly the concepts necessary to understand the climbing stories she relays. A climber herself, she understands her husband's deep need to push himself in the outdoors, but while motherhood calmed those urgings in herself, Alex was forever caught between his passion for the mountains and his deep love and loyalty to his family. Lowe-Anker first tells the story of her adventurous youth by the side of her first love, climbing superstar Alex Lowe. When commercial success came to the climber, it obligated him to commercial trips, first guiding and then sponsored trips.And despite this contradiction, I still felt that her narrative voice was unusually trusting in her readers, and all the lovelier for this. Forget Me Not" spans continents and tells the story of three people whose lives intertwine to a degree they could never have imagined.

Unfortunately – and I think this comes back to the quality of the writing – there wasn’t much self-reflection in this story. 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.

Maybe this is expected, though: it's easier to speak candidly about the distant past, less so about what's closer. 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.