The Everest climbing industry has become so commercialised that we are all ho-hum about individual feats unless someone is summiting for the umpteenth time, or skiing solo down the world’s highest mountain.
This has never been truer than in the case of Melissa Arnot Reid, who has climbed Mt Everest six times as a guide, and is the first American woman to climb it without supplemental oxygen and make it back. Only six other women have done that.
Reid is a television personality and celebrity in her own right back home, and inspires young women and girls through public speaking engagements. She has written a confessional and introspective memoir, laying bare her soul. But the manuscript was originally not meant to be published as a book.
You can tell: it is full of character flaws of other people and herself, bad decisions and even a general lack of empathy. So, it is all there: everything that makes a person an extreme human.
Having had a difficult childhood in Colorado and Montana, especially due to her relationship with her mother. Reid took to climbing first as a form of escape that gradually turned into ambition to prove her self-worth. At 19, she started as a guide on Washington state’s Mount Rainier where she learned the business through some rocky personal choices and experiences.
PERSONAL BATTLES
This is a deeply personal story, full of lows and highs but more than mountaineering feats they are about human shortcomings, and how one internalises them to overcome flaws. So on the one hand, readers may find themselves rooting for her success on mountains while also not liking her very much as a person.
The author herself admitted to hating her younger self during the official launch of the book in Kathmandu in October. In that sense it is honest, frank and confessional. It is self-focused, and hence perhaps the word ‘self’ in the book’s title.
Reid came to Nepal for the first time in 2008 at 23 still seeking legitimacy. She climbed Everest in her the first attempt, and thereafter it was her sole focus to do it without supplemental oxygen which she finally managed in 2016.
Once that ambition was realised, Reid slows down and even admits that self-worth was never about climbing the highest mountains many times and without oxygen, but about the ultimate realisation that she had had enough. Not just with climbing, but also in coming to terms with her past choices in life.
She has been back to Nepal several times, not only as a climber but as co-founder of
The Juniper Fund, the non-profit that works for the welfare of climbing families. The story goes back to 2008 when she met Chhewang Nima Sherpa who had already summited Everest 19 times, but was killed in an avalanche on Baruntse while on an expedition with Reid.
Chhewang’s death was an emotional blow for Reid, she went and met with his family in an uncomfortable setting where she was introduced to his widow and young sons but it was a start of a different journey. The Fund currently supports 300 people from 88 Nepali families dependent on mountaineering.
Towards the end of the memoir, Reid narrates climbing with Lakpa Tenzing Sherpa who was 10 when his father Chhewang died. Reid lets Lakpa lead on
Mt Rainier, and that brought about some emotional closure for her.
The book starts with Reid accepting an oxygen mask just short of the summit of Everest in 2010 and how she took that as a defeat. There are other disasters along the way: the 2014 avalanche on the Khumbu Icefall in which 16 Nepali guides were killed, and the 2015 earthquake that triggered another avalanche at Base Camp that killed 18 climbers.
We learn about her involvement in defusing the famous high-altitude brawl in 2013 at Camp II between Sherpa rope fixers and European climbers Simone Moro and Ueli Steck. This memoir is less about thrilling, edge-of-the-seat climbing accounts, but more a first-person introspection.
The author has a few things to say about how women mountaineers are undermined simply because of their gender. There are increasingly more women climbing now, but their achievements are still overshadowed by headline-grabbing news about record-chasers and their feats.
Interestingly, a Google search comes up with several books titled Enough, including one by Oprah Winfrey. Maybe that is enough.
Enough: Climbing Toward a True Self on Mount Everest
by Melissa Arnot Reid
Penguin Random House, 2026
290 pages
Rs 1,118
