"In this new book, Laura Waterman tells the full story of her unique life. It began on the campus of a boy's school and took her to mountains, growing her own food, and writing. In these pages, readers find what it's like to grow up the daughter of the scholar who put the dashes back into Emily Dickinson's poetry; how Waterman coped with that brilliant father's alcoholism; her development as a groundbreaking climber; and her homesteading life for almost three decades. In these pages she reveals how she kept her strong sense of self while living with a dynamic, lovable, and often challenging man, her late husband, Guy Waterman. She examines closely her role in his suicide on Mount Lafayette in 2000." — Christine Woodside, editor of Appalachia and the author of Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books

Laura Waterman is the author of Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage and Starvation Shore: A Novel. With her husband, Guy Waterman, she maintained the Franconia Ridge in the White Mountains of New Hampshire for almost two decades and was awarded the American Alpine Club's 2012 David R. Brower Award for outstanding service in mountain conservation. Together, she and Guy wrote numerous articles and books on the outdoors, including The Green Guide to Low-Impact Hiking and Camping; Wilderness Ethics: Preserving the Spirit of Wildness; Yankee Rock & Ice: A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States; and A Fine Kind of Madness: Mountain Adventures Tall and True. In 2019, SUNY Press published the thirtieth-anniversary edition of their book Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains. Laura lives in Vermont.