I Need a Hero(ine)

On writing and releasing one of the few mainstream adventure books featuring women.

Margaret Clark

Earlier this month, my new book Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali hit shelves. It’s the gripping, true story of the first all-women’s ascent of any of the world’s big peaks, and an improbable survival tale at that. The release has been a wild ride.

To be totally honest, it’s also been a complete emotional wilderness. I've never put so much of myself—time, passion, creativity, determination to get it all right—into one single writing project. There's definitely pride in having done something so amazing as created an entire book. There’s also the fear of disappointment. Will it do well? (So much hope and expectation.) Will it fall flat? (Devastation.) In creative pursuits, it seems, the highs are higher and the lows are lower.

In fact, this whole release part is so incredibly antithetical to the making of the thing, the flow state in writing, that it’s a tough endeavor to navigate. Frankly, I'm not very good at self-promotion. It feels icky and fake. Which is probably why I suck at social media.

So, I’ll let the book, and why I wanted to write the story, speak for itself.

Female figures in mainstream adventure and exploration literature, in the vein of Endurance and Into Thin Air, are shockingly slim. There remains a void of strong and complex women in the canon. In a time of increasingly permissible misogyny and oppression, when people across the country feel that progress in women’s equality has backslid (I do, anyway), we need examples of real and complex heroines. We need to give women the opportunity to see themselves in real-life, fearless narratives, and men the opportunity to see the possibility of heroic women. We need the stories that tell of female mettle, bravery, curiosity, and impact—on how we see the world, what we know of it, and what we are capable of in it.

And when it comes to that word “complex”—in the past (and even still sometimes today), women weren’t allowed to be complicated. Too often, we’re only meant to play the roles we’ve been historically assigned: lone heroine, damsel in distress, princess, witch. We’re supposed to be likable, or villainized for being unlikable. Far from a fairy tale exploit with clear-cut saints and sinners, I love that the six women of the climbing team in Thirty Below were real and complex individuals on their own arcs of development: each with their own stakes, own emotional weight they were carrying up the mountain, own pressures they were under.

Gender aside—after all, the world doesn’t read books like Into Thin Air and Endurance because they’re “male-focused”; we read them because they’re good adventure yarns—this is just a damn good story. One that reminds us that it’s possible to do the things everyone else believes are impossible.

If you’d like a sneak peak at Thirty Below, it’s been excerpted and covered in Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, The Guardian, TIME, Outside, The Washington Post, Orion, and elsewhere. If you’d like to buy it, please support your local bookstores! Or you can buy from indie stores online here.