She woke in the dead of night, unsure if she’d succeed, fail… or die. Because the last person to attempt what she was doing did die. Melissa Arnot would be walking right past one of Everest’s most infamous bodies—Sleeping Beauty on her sixth, but most perilous climb, of Mount Everest. She was climbing without bottled oxygen, a feat only a handful of women have ever accomplished.

In this inspiring interview with Melissa Arnot Reid, she discusses her beautiful memoir - Enough: Climbing Toward a True Self on Mount Everest - a journey into the soul of one of the world’s great climbers, from the rarified heights of Chomolungma to the dark depths of her personal demons. It's a story familiar to anyone who has struggled to find compassion for themselves.

About Enough
A searching, uplifting memoir by the celebrated, groundbreaking climber: a journey of overcoming where the mountain’s highest peaks can only be reached by traversing the dark crevasses of the soul

At twenty-seven, when Melissa Arnot Reid accepted a tank of oxygen just short of the summit of Mount Everest, she felt ravaged by defeat. Driven by a relentless, lifelong quest to prove to herself, her family, and the world that she was enough, she had set herself an incredible goal—to become the first American woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen. The failure battered her spirit and left her struggling to keep her tenuous grip on hope.

In the candid and adventurous spirit of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Enough is a story of a life in which the most dangerous mountain faces became a refuge—until suddenly they, too, no longer seemed safe. From a childhood marked by conflict, betrayal, and predation, Reid propelled herself to the top of the mountain climbing world, summiting and guiding on the world’s most challenging peaks and establishing herself as a woman unafraid to throw elbows in a milieu dominated by men. And yet for every summit she reached, her valleys of inner turmoil—over her estrangement with the family she believed she’d destroyed as a child; over relationships that cycled through deception and infidelity—grew deeper and more self-destructive. Eventually, she could not keep these worlds from colliding, especially after a series of tragedies at dangerous elevations took the lives of her mentors and friends. Forced at last to face herself, Reid made her most perilous climb yet—toward the uncertain promise of forgiveness and self-acceptance.

A beautiful, aching memoir of a journey with life-and-death stakes on the mountain and off, Enough bares the soul of one of the world’s greatest climbers, from the rarified heights visible only at thin-air altitudes to the dark depths home to demons familiar to anyone who has struggled to find compassion for themselves.

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