Forget Me Not: A Memoir

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The first few chapters of this book are steeped in the early lives of Alex and Jennifer, whose life together wasn't always smooth.

Helping people explore, conserve, learn about, and enjoy the lands and waters of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.A few times, particularly when she was falling in love with Conrad after the death of Alex, she almost got the narration to a place where she was reflecting on the “why,” but never quite did. And despite this contradiction, I still felt that her narrative voice was unusually trusting in her readers, and all the lovelier for this. 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. 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.

But when filmmaker Michael Brown approached them about a documentary on the Khumbu Climbing School a mountaineering clinic they founded to address a lack of training options for Nepal’s climbing Sherpas they invited the cameras into their home. While I can observe the sequence of events and reflect on it myself (and it’s not inherently bad to make a reader work), the narration didn’t give me the author’s thoughts on any of this. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Interesting in its own right, is Jennifer’s path towards becoming an artist; she is a talented painter, and her work graces the cover of the book. Like a Marc Chagall of the American West, Jennifer Lowe-Anker paints lucid dreams, and she’s given us one of her best in Forget Me Not. Alex, however, continued to explore the world as a guide and professional climber, to Yosemite, Denali, K2, Everest, Antarctica, the Himalaya, Baffin Island, the Great Trango Tower, Kyrgyzstan and beyond, all while Jennifer took care of their three sons, Max, Sam and Isaac. I see the film as a way of showing that, even after hardships, you can appreciate what you do have and turn it into something good. Jennifer Lowe-Anker achieves what she sets out to do - painting a portrait of her late first husband, Alex Lowe, in a way that ensures who he was is captured and never forgotten.

Lowe-Anker's writing about her late husband is the portrait of an intensely focused person who struggled but mostly found a way to live and love outside of the mountains that kept him sane.Her writing is luscious - you want to be lost in the romantic descriptions of the Montana mountains and wildlife.

After all, Jenni Lowe-Anker's experience is exactly the other half of what happens in something like Into Thin Air: there are the dead climbers, yes, and then there are their families left behind, who are sometimes flatly, mutely rendered, left without voice in narratives that prize the blizzard outdoors to the one inflicted on the "homefront". Her love of nature, her fierce sense of freedom, the courage with which she moves through whatever life throws at her - what an amazing woman!Then eventually it grows into something blazing, which fixated me, and I was unable to step away from it. So I guess this is more of a contemplation on Forget Me Not, a book I enjoyed immensely, and one that truly moved me.