Tara Westover grew up in the mountains of Idaho, raised by religious parents who feared government interference and prepared for the End of Days. She was ‘home schooled’ – though her education was minimal – and spent most of her days helping her father with his scrap business. An activity that often left her and her brothers injured. As she got older her father became more radical in his beliefs and her older brother was violent towards her. Tara found her escape in education and made it to college and beyond, but leaving her family and everything she knew behind was incredibly hard, and she tried for years to reconcile with them.
I wasn’t expecting to like this one as much when I started reading. The beginning left me cold and her writing style didn’t do anything for me. I thought I was in for a slog, one I maybe wouldn’t finish. But a few chapters in that changed and I was sucked into her world in the mountains with a family that she loved who was doing her harm. I wanted to see how she got away from them. It’s compelling stuff, and she paints a vivid picture of what it was like to grow up like that, and why it was so hard for her to let go. That’s something I find hard to understand in stories such as this, that you can be so mistreated and still cling to those that hurt you. One of her friends asks why she can’t just let them go – when her family is turning against her and calling her the problem, the evil one – and she’s adamant that she can fix it. I just wanted her to cut all ties and be happy in the new life she had made for herself. As someone who doesn’t talk to her own father it’s hard for me to relate. They make your world worse. They have caused and will continue to cause you great hurt. Just be done. Walk away. I understand it’s easier said than done, but it can be done.
Anyway, that wasn’t her story, and part of why it’s so moving is how she comes to terms with that. I do wish the book had gone into more detail about how she got into college etc. It seems wild to me that a university has one test you can pass to get in and it won’t ask for transcripts or recommendations. I do understand that it’s not a ‘how to’ book, and that those details could detract from its point, I’m just interested.
Some of the things she said that I especially related to:
“It was not that I had done something wrong so much as that I existed in the wrong way.”
“We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at any moment.”
“Reality became fluid…’Talking to you, your reality is so warped. It’s like talking to someone who wasn’t even there.’ I agreed. It was exactly like that.”
Living with people who twist everything you say and do can make you feel like the crazy one, can make you doubt yourself, and she does an amazing job of conveying that.