“Journey to the Self”: A Conversation with Mimi Zieman by Diane Gottlieb

Mimi Zieman’s Tap Dancing on Everest: a young doctor’s unlikely adventure is certainly a thrilling adventure story, but it is so much more than that. While there are plenty of tense and dramatic scenes at the mountain, Zieman also visits her beginnings, as she documents her moving personal journey from a curious young girl of immigrant parents to the bold medical student who became the only woman and only medical person to join a daring mountaineering team. Tap Dancing on Everest is not a traditional coming of age story, yet it is a beautiful memoir about forging one’s identity and a powerful testament to the power of testing limits, whether they be nature’s or limits of one’s own making. 

Gottlieb: Congratulations on a wonderful memoir! I'm in awe of your adventures and your mountain experiences, but even just the idea of them terrifies me.

What do you think motivates a person to do this? What motivated you?

Zieman: That's why I wrote the book now, because at this older age, I can look back and ask the same question, why and how did that girl raised in New York City, daughter of immigrants end up in Tibet at 25 taking care of an all-male team? I thought that was interesting and thought I had a different kind of mountaineering story. Usually, they're focused on the heroics of the climbers, but there are other people with stories. In this case, the medical person – and only woman - on the team.

It always comes back to the way I felt in the mountains. What motivated me was more of a spiritual drive to spend as much time there as I could. I know it's hard to put that in ways that doesn't sound cliché, but I think that was part of a journey of finding out who I am. When you put yourself in new and hard situations, you connect with deeper parts of yourself that are needed to battle fear and vulnerability.

It was a privilege to do that at a young age because I think people can go many decades and not reach that deeply into themselves. When I went alone to hike Nepal at 22, I had to be with myself for a few months, connecting deeply. Yoga is described in the Bhagavad Gita as a “journey of the self, through the self, to the self,” and the solitude of backpacking alone in the mountains was a similar experience.

Gottlieb: Did you on some level know that that was going to be an outcome? Did you say, I'm going to climb in Nepal to find myself?

Zieman: No, not at all.

That's the other thing I discovered while writing. I was really driven by curiosity. I saw pictures of Tibet and thought, If I love the mountains of Colorado, what are the Himalayas like? I always liked travel, and I think I knew that you discover different parts of yourself when you travel.

Gottlieb: You refer to your family as “my map of origin, my genetic and emotional signposts.” I love the cartographical metaphor. Can you tell us about your family and the signposts that stood out most?

Zieman: I think they influenced me in the sense that they were tough, strong people who had all been displaced by war, so the signposts are about forging ahead, and independence.

My grandmother, who had a big influence on me, was from Berlin. She had been working as a choreographer in the Berlin Opera House and was fired for being Jewish. She left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power and went to what was called the British Mandate of Palestine. That's where my mother was born.

My mother was a very strong woman, very opinionated. You could say she was domineering or controlling, but with a big heart. My father was originally from Latvia. His entire family was killed in the Holocaust. He was the only survivor. He met my mother in Germany after the war, and all three of them came here, first my grandmother and the following year my parents. They were from a generation that left children to their own devices, and as immigrants, they were very busy assimilating to U.S. culture, learning how to make a living. So, from a young age I had this need to figure out who I was going to be, what my path was going to be, separate from their survival and immigrant journeys. I experimented a lot, again, partly out of curiosity and partly because no one was hovering over me.

Gottlieb: Maintaining a positive body image when you were growing up was a real struggle. Your relationships with food and your weight were fraught.

Zieman: I feel like those kinds of body issues are so common and universal that I wanted to include them in the book. So many people highlight that throughline to tell me they feel like it’s their story. I was a chubby child in an overweight family and felt a lot of shame, which increased my desire to hide. Later, I developed restricted eating, and although very thin, felt the same body shame. It was when my body was dancing and hiking that I felt peaceful in my body and joy in movement.

Similarly, I decided to include being harassed by men at different points in my life because that's an experience all women go through. I wanted readers to be able to find relatable themes, and those were important influences on forming identity, which is what the book ended up being about.

Gottlieb: I'm thinking of the ways the body has been so primary to your story. You love to climb and hike. You were a dancer—you tap-danced on Mount Everest and have the picture to prove it. Have you come to a place of being comfortable with your body?

Zieman: Society is finally accepting that our body's experiences are as important as our minds. I think a lot of us are comfortable walking around as if we're just a brain in the world and we don't pay attention to our bodies. The whole focus on mindfulness and meditating is a way to give the body space to be without our minds getting in the way. And that's what I tried to convey in the book too. I was happier dancing or hiking, when I could get out of my head and let my body lead.

The body was important in the book also because I became a physician. I had so much shame and insecurity about my own body, but my role was to keep everyone else's body healthy. It's at the end when I say, "Oh, I guess my body stayed healthy too. I have to give it credit where credit is due." That's a learning process throughout the book, and to answer your question, it’s an ongoing process throughout life: To focus on what my body can do and not on all its failings whether in appearance or physical limitations.

Gottlieb: How did you become the medical support person on this trip while you were still in medical school?

Zieman: While I was hiking in Nepal, before I started med school, I became friends with Everest climbers who I knew wanted to return for an Everest expedition. At the time, I had just spent months in these magnificent mountains, and I thought an expedition would be a perfect opportunity to return, and maybe I could serve in the role as doctor. I just thought it would take a much longer time than it did. I was invited about a year later, and the expedition was going to be while I was in medical school. That was a lot of responsibility for someone so early in their medical training. But I just could not resist that opportunity. I knew it was a once in a lifetime thing.

Gottlieb: You said you wanted to tell the story of other people, not just the climbers. It takes a village. You were the village doctor and you wanted to tell that story. But were there other factors driving you to tell the story? What did you learn about yourself and your family from writing the memoir? Did it fill in gaps of understanding for you?

Zieman: I was also driven to question why some people opt to stay close to home, not venturing out much, while others take risks, whether through travel or career changes or other opportunities. And yes, it definitely made me go deeper into questioning my family and how I grew up and the choices I made. How much are we a product of our families and how much do we determine our paths? I didn't plan to write this deeper kind of memoir, making myself so vulnerable, sharing my aspirations and insecurities, but that’s what happened. I sat down one day and started writing, thought I was just finally telling my Everest story but then let the writing take me where it wanted to go. It became a coming-of-age story, threaded with feminism, medicine, and adventure that I describe as the risks we take to become our truest selves. That was some other force within me coming out.

Gottlieb: Isn't it amazing how that happens? You sit down to do one thing and something else appears.

Zieman: Yes! It completely surprised me, and I had to learn to surrender to the process.

Gottlieb: I think that's a real strength of the book. It has appeal to people who aren’t necessary drawn to adventure stories. You share so many different life experiences, which I would imagine any really good adventure story would.  

Zieman: Well, yes and no. A lot of mountaineering tales written by men are often just about the adventure. They don't go very deep personally, and yet they are still often riveting.

Gottlieb: That leads me to my next question. How was it to be a woman in this very male-dominated culture of climbing, 36 years ago?

Zieman: It was often alienating. I think that I often did my default behavior, which is making myself small and hide. I was not a person who liked a lot of attention. And the expedition was long, I was away for four months, and we saw no other westerners until the end.

It's a lot of time together. I found them often doing male bonding behavior, talking about their climbs and their girlfriends. And I would go to my tent, read, listen to my music, write in my journal, thankfully. This is why the book is so detailed, because I had the notes from my journal.

When I did come into my own, whether it was leading the Passover Seder or that tap dancing scene, when I did things that were authentically me and shared those parts with them, those are strong moments for me. I wasn't a climber, so I'm naturally going to be in the background anyway. I'm not an expert on most of the decisions being made except for my little area of health.

Gottlieb: What would you most like your readers to take away from your exceptional adventure and experience?

Zieman: Anytime we put ourselves out there, we're flexing our courage muscle. I think a big message of the book is when you make yourself vulnerable and stretch really far outside of your comfort zone, you’ll learn more about yourself.

The thing about writing a memoir is you really don't want it to be, "Hey, look at me and look what I did." You want it to include themes that a reader can relate to. I hope that people read the book and feel more empowered themselves to try new things, to feel more comfortable with change and with accepting there’s a lot they don’t have control over.

I loved it when a male in his twenties told me, "I loved your book because I could relate to the immigrant story." Or when a hospital tech who works with my husband said, "I'm a 300-pound Black woman, and I saw myself in your writing about body image." That's what a writer wants.

Mimi Zieman’s Tap Dancing on Everest: a young doctor’s unlikely adventure is available from Falcon Books.