One of my inspirations is rock climber Tommy Caldwell. I briefly recount his story, and its influence on me, in my book Eating Glass.
Caldwell’s story is one of growing through severe hardship, discovering new inner strength, and leveraging that strength to tackle a seemingly impossible challenge: free climbing the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. Caldwell’s ordeal began in 2000 while climbing in Kyrgyzstan. Armed terrorists kidnapped him, two friends, and his sort-of-girlfriend, professional climber Beth Rodden. For six days they endured severe privation and forced marching. They didn’t know if they would live or die. At one point, the terrorists marched another prisoner out of sight and executed him. Their ordeal only ended when Caldwell shoved a captor off a cliff, enabling them to escape to a friendly military camp and back to U.S. protection.
The next year, Caldwell accidentally sawed off his left index finger with a table saw—an injury that would have ended the careers of most climbers. Caldwell came back with a vengeance, climbing harder than ever and knocking out one history-making climb after another. Then, in 2010, he divorced. In his memoir The Push, Caldwell writes candidly about Beth’s unhappiness, her emotional distancing, an affair, and an agonized back-and-forth season about whether the marriage could be saved. In the end, it couldn’t. Instead of succumbing to his anguish, Tommy directed his pain into a new project: climbing the Dawn Wall.
The documentary chronicling Caldwell’s life and ascent, The Dawn Wall, is one of my favorite movies. It came at a time when I needed it. I was dealing with challenges in my own life, and I found Caldwell’s relentless striving deeply appealing. I had given up climbing eighteen years earlier, after a near-miss that could have killed me. The film made me wonder how much I was letting fear rule me, both in climbing and life. What if I, like Tommy, possessed strength I could scarcely imagine? What might I be capable of?
In the past years since watching The Dawn Wall, climbing has become an important part of my life again, a source of community, and an arena for developing strength. I’ve faced and overcome fears and advanced further than I ever thought I could. I have Tommy to thank for that.
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Given the personal importance Tommy’s story holds for me, I immediately took note when Beth Rodden released her own memoir, A Light Through the Cracks. Rodden is a titan of climbing in her own right, with a long list of historical achievements, which alone would make the book worth reading. But she was also Tommy Caldwell’s wife and lived through many of the same hardships.
The best literature, in my view, does not take sides; it portrays three-dimensional characters, human, well-meaning, imperfect, finding their way through the world. That brings them into inevitable conflict and tragedy but also brings opportunities for goodness and redemption. That was the mindset with which I approached Rodden’s book. Much of the climbing world treated her harshly after the divorce, but I was eager to understand her story.
A Facebook post from Rodden set the tone for how I received this book. She posted several photographs, including an endearing scanned photo of herself and Tommy, barely more than teenagers. She acknowledges there was a time she never wanted to remember these moments again. But now, she wrote, she sees “two kids, doing their best, young and eager, learning how to adult together.” The compassionate tone hinted at a deeper story beneath the divorce, and the possibility of at least partial healing.
I needed to believe in that moment. Over the past two years, my own 19-year marriage had unexpectedly ended. There was so much I didn’t understand. Beth’s book and story, I hoped, would somehow speak to mine.
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The Light Through the Cracks is a very good book. Rodden is raw, brutal, and honest. It is surreal, re-living Tommy Caldwell’s well-told captivity story with her incredible gift for detail. Rodden’s version is visceral, nightmarish, and intensely physical. The horror of her captor squeezing up against them for warmth at night, and his public masturbation throughout their forced march; the lack of a discernible “thud” after their captors execute another prisoner behind a nearby boulder; the embarrassment of menstruating during their rescue, the congealed mess when finally peeling off her filthy clothes.
It didn’t take me long to realize that this is not a book about climbing at all, not at the heart. It’s a book about Rodden’s deep trauma, her reckoning with her deepest wounds, and her journey to healing and the reinvention of her life.
Rodden brings the same unflinching honesty to every dimension of her life. She does not shy away from the dark places but turns them over carefully, exposing them to the light. She writes about her struggles to feel attracted to Tommy, their lack of sexual chemistry, and her sense of being overshadowed by him (and by men in general) in the climbing world. Even so, she is unfailingly courteous to Tommy; one senses he has done nothing wrong, apart from being cheerfully unable to comprehend the depth of her struggle. She writes honestly about her affair, her guilt, and her feeling of being trapped between the “good girl” impulses that have always served her so well and her desperate yearning for a new kind of life.
The theme of embodiment emerges from every page of the book. Few us are comfortable in our bodies, especially women. Female athletes have long faced pressure to appear sexy. Climbers face additional challenges, and have a long and unfortunate history with eating disorders. The arch-nemesis of climbers is gravity, and a desire for incremental performance gains can drive toxic weight-loss behaviors. Rodden explores all of this: the way she carries her traumas, her ruthless disciplining of her body, its subsequent breakdowns, the way her sense of self-worth becomes entangled with body image and performance.
By the end of the book, Rodden escapes this destructive spiral. Pregnancy and childbirth, more than anything else, give her a new appreciation for the goodness of her body and help her to reimagine her relationship with both her body and climbing. A short, free Reel Rock documentary, This is Beth Rodden, provides a wonderful overture of the book’s themes on this point. She also finds constructive challenge and healing in her new relationship.
I’m glad Rodden waited as long as she did to write this book, because it gave her time to complete a dramatic life transformation. This is a woman who has grown through her midlife journey into someone tougher, wiser, and just as fearless. She has learned to relax her definition of achievement, pursue healing from her traumas, value friendships in a new way, and enjoy the simple pleasures of ordinary life outside of climbing.
The book also satisfied my hope for at least some insight into her post-divorce relationship with Tommy and his wife Becca. One senses they have put hard work into maintaining a positive relationship. Beth’s description of her friendship with Becca is particularly heart-warming. None of this could have been easy for anyone—I’m sure it still isn’t—but I found these passages hopeful as I navigate my own post-divorce life.
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Writing such a raw memoir is not easy, and releasing it into the wild is even harder. I know, because I wrote a raw memoir of my own. Eating Glass is about navigating feelings of personal failure, and along the way it becomes a much larger meditation on living a meaningful life. To this day, I fret over its rawness, the risk of oversharing, the critical ways it might be received. Occasional e-mails from readers assure me that the book speaks powerfully to those who need it.
Tommy Caldwell expressed uncertainty about writing his own memoir, The Push, in a 2023 podcast with Finding Mastery (31:00). He acknowledged that writing the memoir helped him understand himself and his experiences better, but he “was uncertain whether he was any better off for it.” It made him “darker” and “a little bit more angstful.” He was glad he wrote the book but also wondered if there is a “little bit of wisdom in blind optimism.” A listener senses that he will always look back on the book with mixed feelings.
I suspect Beth Rodden has similar anxieties about her book, so I just want to say loud and clear: its unflinching honesty is the source of its power. The highest praise I can give is that I told my 14 year-old daughter, a fiercely driven athlete, that I want her to read it.
I have to wonder what Tommy thinks about this. It’s one thing for Beth to lay it all out there; it’s another thing for him to see private details of his life in print. I’ll circle back to what I said about good literature, about the complexities of well-meaning people doing their best in life. If anything, the book heightened my respect for him. It’s possible to hold the humanity of both individuals, appreciate their honest humanity, and recognize that they walked very different life journeys in processing their captivity in Kyrgyzstan and everything thereafter.
As I conclude, it strikes me that I’ve written very little about Rodden’s rich descriptions of her formidable climbing career. Maybe that’s because the book fulfilled its purpose. Rodden’s career is impressive, but she puts it in the much larger context of a life.