Notes from the Top

The Sharp End of Life

“I’ve been writing my book for many years,” Deirdre Wolownick shares from her home in Sacramento, California, as we chat over tea and cookies. She’s warm and friendly. She’s home for the day between stops on her book tour, which gives her a break and helps her recover from her recent corrective foot surgery.

This house has a brown piano in the living room and family pictures in every room, with many showing shots of the family climbing together in California. Deirdre’s books and Alex’s books are lined up on either side on one bookshelf. His titles include his autobiography Alone on the Wall and Mark Synnott’s biography The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life. Her titles include English for (Foreign) Language Students and her latest Allez! Foundations

in Beginning French. There’s also The Sharp End of Life: A Mother’s Story.

“It started out about Alex and me,” she says of her memoir. “I was confounded by this or that; he was a hard kid to raise because he’s so different. The publishers said it was great but they wanted to hear my story. It became less about him and more about our life together. The four of us.”

She’s referring to her son who needs no introduction, as well as her daughter Stasia who is two years older than Alex, and her late ex-husband Charles Forest Honnold, who died in 2004. She dedicated her book to “Charlie,” penning that it was he, “who made my life better in so many ways, and who gave me the greatest gifts of all … And for Stasia and Alex.”

Born in New York City shortly after WWII, Deirdre was raised in an immigrant neighbourhood. “I was brought up to be an obedient eastern European girl,” she says, where her options were to be a housewife, or either a secretary or a nurse. “That’s what girls did. I never bought into that – I never wanted to be like the people all around me. That’s what the book’s about. It’s about a lot of other things too.”

In 2015, Deirdre, who speaks eight languages including sign language, retired from teaching after 44 years, including 27 as a college language professor. She then took up the outdoor sports her children enjoyed. Stasia got her into trail running and within a few years, despite having felt reluctant about running even a mile, Deirdre completed several marathons. At age 58, she took up climbing and at age 66 she climbed El Cap – becoming the oldest woman to climb the formation – in a day via Lurking Fear with Alex and his friend Sam Crossley; the two lead and cleaned the pitches.

As if writing The Sharp End of Life isn’t hard enough, Deirdre wrote a second book at the same time, a beginning French textbook for colleges and high schools. “It’s not just a text book, it’s a whole method – it’s a different approach to teaching language,” she says. Earlier this past year, Deirdre set her eyes on climbing big walls with partners other than her famous son, taking several trips to Yosemite to train and prepare, but retreating due to crowds and time constraints.

This spring, however, her corrective foot surgery kept her inside in a non-weightbearing recovery period – “and still is, darn it!” The doctors told her to expect a threemonth recovery and it’s taken more than six, which has cramped her other engagements.

As she limps through the kitchen to get an item, she has ice wrapped around her foot. Since the book release on May 2 at the outdoor store rei in Sacramento, she’s been touring the western U.S. to promote it. This spring and summer she’s speaking at 20 cities from California to Washington, with the list growing to include Colorado.

Her book, she says, is about “going forth, going for your dream – not listening the naysayers, not buying into other people’s limits in you no matter how old you are or who you are. Anybody can do anything if they really want to badly enough. My son exposes that concept constantly. I watch both my kids do that. The only limits are the ones that you accept for yourself.” The book is also being published in France and Spain in 2020, so she’ll soon have a European book tour coming up, which to her also means climbing internationally. “There are lots of places I want to climb on this planet. I’m not getting any younger,” she says.

Deirdre plans to climb in Yosemite starting in autumn 2019, with her eyes on the South Face of Washington Column, plus she plans to climb in Italy, Greece, Mexico and China: “I once lived in Japan for four years. I want to go and climb the limestone there, to do the sport climbs.” She also wants to visit Ontario. “There’s a moderate tower there that calls out to me,” she says.

The Sharp End of Life: A Mother’s Story is available now.