Unravelled
By Katie Brown Mountaineers Books, 2022
Tensions lie at the heart of Unravelled, Katie Brown’s memoir of her life as one of the world’s first great competition climbers and then as a leading outdoor climber who’s onsight of the Regular Northwest Face VI 5.12 of Half Dome stands as an outstanding achievement. There’s the tension between fear and desire which lies at the heart of the climbing experience. It’s desire that prevails on Half Dome, and it’s a day that Brown carries with her as a streak of glory. Desire takes her to the top of the podium as the world cup circuit emerges from the regional competitions and one-off events of the early 1990s. There’s also the tension between persona and personhood which would cleave Brown as she navigated competition climbing at time when coaching had yet to be professional and structured youth development was still in the future. Her mother was her coach and, in essence, her manager. It wasn’t the healthiest of relationships. Today, it’s hard to imagine a young talented competition climber reaching the top ranks under such fraught conditions.
Unravelled explores these tensions in an unapologetic way all the while staying close to events as they were experienced at the time. Brown’s commitment to keeping a journal shows its value here. It sets up a dialogue between her present self as a reflective author and various former selves—some well-defined, some inchoate. “How things felt” is the strength of the book and Unravelled is uniquely insider perspective on the time when indoor climbing began to be formalised as a sport and when those standards began to be applied to stone.
How central can climbing be? Brown left competition climbing on the cusp of adulthood and sought build a life for herself. It wasn’t easy. At one point, she found herself in a two-hundred-square-foot-cabin in a remote part of Colorado writing feverishly but with limited social interaction and no rope to tie into. Upon waking in the morning, she would feel a moment of peace; but then a crushing weight would drag her down. Some days she just wanted to stay asleep so that she could live in an imaginary world rather than trying to navigate the real one. Recalling a conversion about hopes and dreams with Chris Sharma while in isolation, Brown recognises that climbing was really the only thing she had at that point in her life. And she chooses to build on that, however conflicted her emotions. That decision takes her to some of the world’s great climbing destinations and further world of adventure outdoors. It’s during this, the second phase of her climbing career that she succeeds on Half Dome and the Leaning Tower among other coveted ascents.