Chapter One

Ain't No Mountain High Enough:

Women's Extreme-Adventure Stories

(and One of My Own)



Among the many dangers of being an obsessive reader is that you tend to mediate your life through books, filter your experiences through plots, so that the boundary between fiction and fact becomes porous. One evening, during the years I was living as a graduate student in Philadelphia, I was watching TV when a commercial for the local electric company came on. The commercial was promoting a program to help addled senior citizens keep track of their bills. On the screen was an elderly man sitting at a dining room table, staring at a pile of windowed envelopes. He looked a little bit like my dad, and sure enough, as the screen widened out to include the rest of the room, there was a big black-and-white photograph of my father as a toddler, dressed in a sailor suit, surrounded by his two older sisters and their parents. "Oh, there's the photograph," I thought to myself. I had a framed copy in my living room-all the Corrigans and their descendants have a copy of that photograph hanging somewhere in their homes.

Aside from being a striking image-my grandfather with his handlebar mustache staring soberly into the camera; my grandmother in a long dark dress with a lace collar, holding my dad on her lap; my two aunts, smiling, one in a First Communion dress-it was a picture occasioned by tragedy. My grandmother Margaret had been diagnosed with cancer, and she and my grandfather John had the photograph taken to help the children remember her. She died in 1925, when my father was five years old.