With Mt. Everest peaking in the distance, Silvia Vasquez-Lavado led a group of young hikers to the oldest nunnery in Nepal. In a makeshift temple scribbled with yellow ceremonial scarves, the hikers—women of color, queer, straight, nonbinary; all survivors of sexual violence—quietly absorbed the nuns' chanting song. "The small stone room cradles us," Vasquez-Lavado writes in In the Shadow of the Mountain (Henry Holt, 2022), "and the girls sit at peace, eyes closed, in the dark. It's only my mind, I realize, that's trying to run, darting a million miles an hour, looking for a way out."

A college scholarship brought Vasquez-Lavado from Lima, Peru, to the United States. After graduating, she took an entry-level position at Skyy Vodka and later became a rising star at eBay. Vasquez-Lavado began to embrace her queer identity; meanwhile, her drinking escalated. An ayahuasca session brought visions of mountains, and of her previous sexual assault. She set out to take on the Seven Summits—the highest peaks on the continents—and became the first openly gay woman to ascend them.

What makes this remarkable story so moving is the raw honesty with which Vasquez-Lavado and the hikers she organized through her nonprofit, Courageous Girls, chronicle their experiences with sexual abuse. During her childhood in Peru, Vasquez-Lavado was always "looking for a way out" of the assaults. It's that drive to escape, to defy, that eventually pushes her up the macho corporate ladder at Silicon Valley start-ups, into alcoholism, and then across continents as a thrill-seeker breaking boundaries with her bare hands.

Threaded throughout muscular descriptions of ascending Everest is the thin line between catharsis and the abyss. "Everest . . . taught me that I want to live this life, this messy, painful life," she writes. "Sometimes, it takes a long walk to see how far you've come."

This article appeared in the Spring 2022 quarterly edition with the headline "Coming Up for Air."