>> Colleen Shogan: Good afternoon. My name is Colleen Shogan. I work at the Library of Congress. Welcome to the 18th Annual National Book Festival. A couple of housekeeping items before we get started. Please silence your cell phones if you haven't already. And there will be time for a Q&A at the end of the session so please be sure to save your questions. I'm honored to be joined onstage today by Tara Westover, the author of Educated. Tara grew up in rural Idaho. She's a graduate of Brigham Young University, and she also received her PhD in history from Cambridge University in the UK. And I think that's all I'm going to say about Tara and her biography for now because I think we're going to get into a lot of the details in our conversation today. If you haven't read Educated, I highly recommend it. I picked it up at the beginning of a trans-Atlantic flight from Europe back to Washington, DC, and I didn't put it down the entire flight. And that's really the marker of a terrific book. But I am not the only person who thinks Educated is a terrific book because a few weeks ago President Barack Obama issued a list of his top five books that he read this summer and Tara's book, Educated, was on that list. ^M00:01:19 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:24 So how did you find out about that? Did President Obama tweet you? Did he text you ahead of time? Or how did you find out? >> Tara Westover: I had been told that he was reading it. >> Colleen Shogan: Mmhmm. >> Tara Westover: But I don't think I took that very -- no, I'd been told that he'd said he was going to read it. >> Colleen Shogan: OK. >> Tara Westover: Which, I know what I'm like when I say I'm going to read a book. And I thought, yeah, sure you -- [laughing]. >> Colleen Shogan: Right. >> Tara Westover: So no, I wasn't expecting it. I went. I had a lunch with a friend. It was very nice. And then I left and I did that thing that we all do now as soon as we stop talking to someone and we're alone -- we look at our phone. And I checked my email and there was an email from my agent who said, "This has just happened!" [Laughter] And yeah, it was a lovely surprise. And then a couple of days later I got a call. I was at my house and then my phone rang and I answered it. And they said, "Do you think you have time this afternoon for a call from President Obama?" [Whispering] I was like -- [speaking again] yeah! [Laughter] I can fit that in with all the other former presidents who are calling me. [Laughing] Maybe at 2:15. So he really generously called me and was just really thoughtful, kind. He has a lot of things going on in his life. He did not have to do that. So I mean, that was pretty -- I've had some weird things happen in my life and that was pretty weird. >> Colleen Shogan: Yep. >> Tara Westover: You know? [Laughter] That was right up there with some of the strangest things that I never thought would happen. >> Colleen Shogan: So to start us out, in your book I think one of the strengths of the book is your really vivid descriptions of where you grew up. And the setting of your book is so important because it sets the entire framework for the story. So in your own words can you talk to us a little bit about the place where you grew up? >> Tara Westover: Yeah. I was raised the youngest of seven children on this mountain in Idaho. And a lot of people know we didn't go to school. We didn't go to the doctor. I didn't have a birth certificate. We had these quite radical aspects of our lives. I think some people think that that means it was a bleak childhood and it really wasn't. It was a pretty happy childhood. There were a lot of beautiful things. We had horses. We had a junkyard. But I know that doesn't sound really great but it kind of was a lot of the time. I mean, if you ever want to have a really good game of hide and seek or treasure hunting or any kind of game at all, having your own junkyard is pretty amazing. You know? We'd go to my grandmother's house and we'd play that lava game where you pretend like everything is lava except the pillows you put on the floor but do that with junk cars that you can jump from. Like, it was great! So a lot of really wonderful things about my childhood and then there were some kind of difficult things about it. So not being able to go to school was difficult. I never had any friends. I never went to another kid's house. I called them public school kids and I never had any friends who were public school kids. I never went to their house. They never came to mine. And so there were these kind of slightly darker, more difficult elements. And eventually I would go to college. I would not really know what I was doing or why I was doing it. But I would teach myself enough algebra to pass the ACT and I would wind up at a university and that would be a pretty big shock [chuckling]. And then life would change pretty dramatically. But my childhood itself -- yeah, I think like a lot of people's lives it wasn't one thing. It was mixed. >> Colleen Shogan: So your book is about your own journey to become educated and your educational journey. It's also about your relationship with your family. Can you talk a little bit about your mother and father in particular and their views on education? >> Tara Westover: My parents, I think they were quite idealistic about education when my older brothers were young. My father was kind of paranoid about the government, about many different things. He thought the government had been infiltrated by something like the Illuminati, this nefarious organization that was corrupting everything. And he believed public education was a part of that. So he didn't want us in the schools because he was not -- he didn't want them teaching us things that he didn't agree with. So that was, I think, when my parents first made the decision to homeschool their kids. I think they had a fairly idealistic view that they would -- at least my mother, I think thought that she could provide a better education at home. But that just kind of gave way, fell by the wayside so that by the time that I came along and my three older -- the three that are just older than me -- there wasn't a lot of by way of education. There were -- I mean, I was definitely taught to read by one of my older brothers, so I was literate. Reading was important to my family. But it wasn't -- I never took an exam. I never wrote an essay. I never remember anything like a formal lecture which is why I could arrive at BYU -- and there's serious questions to how I got into BYU [laughing] because I wasn't qualified. ^M00:06:11 But you know, that's how I could arrive at a university when I was 17 and go into a classroom and say, "what is this word: Holocaust?" I hadn't heard it before. And I'd never heard of the civil rights movement. There were so many things I didn't know. I thought Europe was a country, not a continent. That was very confusing. And so I had this education that was incredibly spotty because it had just never been formal in any way. But I think my parents, strangely enough, I don't think it's that they completely didn't value it. It just didn't happen. And I think their idea of education was such that it was entirely kind of your responsibility and if you wanted to learn something you should go learn it. But there were difficulties with that. You know, not everyone can teach themselves calculus. I don't think I could do that. I sort of taught myself trigonometry and it didn't go great. >> Colleen Shogan: So instead of following a homeschool program or going to a public school or a private school, you worked with your father in the scrapyard, in the junkyard. Can you talk a little bit about that? And was that -- did you learn anything from that? Was it an unconventional form of education? >> Tara Westover: People always said in my family that one thing we know how to do is we really know how to work. And we really do. We're really good workers. And I think I did learn a really good work ethic working with my dad. I think people judge my dad really harshly. And I struggle with that because I tried to write him the way that I see him and the way that I think he is. We got injured a lot in my dad's junkyard, really horrifically, and it was completely unnecessary. A few safety precautions, basic ones [chuckles]. Nothing elaborate here. You know, harnesses. And people wouldn't have gotten hurt the way they did. And then of course because he had these beliefs about doctors we didn't go to the hospital. And it's hard for me to convince people that this wasn't malicious. You know, my dad loved his kids but he put his kids in danger a lot and then once they were hurt he didn't give them medical attention. And that is hard for people to square. It's hard for me to square. It's hard to square that circle. I've squared it for myself by believing that I -- my thing is that my dad has a mental illness. I think he's bipolar. For some reason he doesn't have that bone in his head that tells him when something is dangerous. And so he would routinely ask us to do things or tell us to do things that were so dangerous. But the redeeming fact, I suppose, is, you know, my dad never had us do anything or put us in any danger that he wouldn't have put himself in. So it was not the case that my father would, you know, if we were injured not take us to a doctor but then if he was injured take himself to a doctor. I mean, the worst injury that happened in my father's junkyard happened to my father. He was standing next to a car. He was removing a fuel tank. Because he just doesn't think rationally about things, he decided not to drain the fuel before he lit a torch and started to remove the tank. And you know, fuel is flammable. So the car exploded and he was burned terribly, unbelievably bad. And it was months of recovering and he nearly died. And of course, my parents because of the beliefs that they have, they did not take him to the hospital. They treated that at home. And the pain was unimaginable. But so I tell this story because I think it shows for my father he was doing what he thought the right thing was. You might disagree and it's hard for people to understand. For my father, I think what love looked like for his children was not taking them to the doctor, not taking my brother to the doctor when he lit his leg on fire and it was terribly burned, because he sincerely believed it. So he wasn't an unloving father. He didn't put us through things and then be kinder to himself. These were his beliefs. And so the story is it's a little more complicated than what do you do when people treat you badly because they don't care about you. It's more a story of what do you do when you love someone and they love you and there is just something disfunctional about it that is harmful to you? And that is a harder situation to resolve. And I think it's probably one that most people face. I don't know a lot of people who their trouble with their parents is just a completely evil parent that doesn't care for them at all. I'm sure there are some parents like that. But I think it's -- you know, a family is incredibly nuanced. And for me, writing the book, that was one of the things I really wanted to tease apart which is to say I love my father, I think he's a good person, I think he loves me. I think he wants what he thinks is best for me. And [laughs] they're not always the same thing as what I think is best for myself. And how do we navigate that? And what if we can't navigate it and how do we accept the outcome of not being able to navigate it? >> Colleen Shogan: For most of your childhood you thought that you would follow in your mother's footsteps, that you would study to become an herbalist. You might take over her business as a midwife. But then at some point -- you changed your mind at some point. Can you tell us about how you made that decision not to follow the path that you thought you were going to follow? >> Tara Westover: I think it was -- you know, it's funny. I was just flipping through the book. I'm going to read a little bit. >> Colleen Shogan: Sure. >> Tara Westover: Because it's here and it's open and it's completely relevant. It's what you just said. ^M00:11:40 [ Laughter ] ^M00:11:41 >> Colleen Shogan: We did not plan it. [Laughing] >> Tara Westover: No, no planning and no planning in my life [laughing]. So I'm just going to do two paragraphs. Don't worry. It won't be long. Three. I'd come to BYU to study music so that one day I could direct a church choir but that semester, the fall of my junior year, I didn't enroll in a single music course. I could not have explained why I dropped Advanced Music Theory in favor of Geography and Comparative Politics or gave up Sight Singing to take up History of the Jews. But when I'd seen those courses in the catalog and read their titles aloud, I had felt something infinite and I wanted a taste of that infinity. For four months I attended lectures on geography and history and politics. I learned about Margaret Thatcher and the 38th parallel and the cultural revolution. I learned about parliamentary politics and electoral systems around the world. I learned about the Jewish Diaspora and the strange history at the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. By the end of the semester the world felt big and it was hard to imagine returning to the mountain, to a kitchen, or even to a piano in the room next to the kitchen. This caused a kind of crisis in me. My love of music and my desire to study it had been compatible with my idea of what a woman is. My love of history and politics and world affairs was not and yet they called to me. I don't know as though there's a straightforward answer to that. I think I'd been raised with a very strong idea of what my life was supposed to look like. And there were a number of alternative paths that you could take that all followed very closely to that path. So you could go to college and study music so that you could be a piano teacher because that was complementary to being a wife and a homemaker and that was very much what I was raised to be. And there wasn't really a lot of other avenues. There were a couple of things you could do as well that might be commensurate with that. And I had a big struggle at BYU because I was drawn to things that by my own definition of myself and my own definition of what it meant to be female didn't add up. I did not understand why I as a woman was drawn to what I thought of as unwomanly things but I definitely was. And it took me a couple of years of kind of wrestling with that. And I think I was at Cambridge, really, before I started reading a bit of feminist text. I was in no way ready for anything that most feminists would call feminism [laughing], but I stumbled on this passage in John Stuart Mill. And I've read a lot of feminist stuff since then. And this is still the most powerful thing that has resonated with me, personally. It's a line that he says. He says, "of the nature of women, nothing final can be known." And his argument is all the social pressure. Women have been cajoled and pushed and defined to themselves and changed in so many different ways. And now we have no idea what they're capable of. We just don't know. We don't know what they are because we've been deforming them for so long. And that was, you know, that whole absence of knowledge was so appealing to me. I mean, of the nature of women nothing final can be known. Because to me what that felt like was, whatever I'm drawn to, whatever I want to be, I am a woman. So that must be OK. And I don't need to find external definitions of what I should be like, what I should love, what I should want to do. I can just discard all of that and I can say, definitionally you can't say that women don't like politics, that women don't like history because I am one and I do. So that was incredibly -- that, just, absence, to take all of what we think we know and throw it away and make your decisions based on what you think is right for you. It was really wonderful for me and it had nothing to do with not wanting family and not wanting children or rejecting that way of life. It just had to do with accepting other parts of who I was. >> Colleen Shogan: When you were at BYU it was very difficult for you when you started. But even in your first semester that you were there you still got very good grades. You were very successful. How did you do that? Do you look back at that moment in time and are you in sort of awe of what you were able to do and the transition and the changes that you overcame? How were you successful after going from no formal education to a very competitive school? >> Tara Westover: [Sighs] I suffered a lot of that first semester [laughing]. It was kind of awful, actually. I remember that. It was not a happy time. There was a lot of -- I would say my first two years at BYU where I was learning out of fear because I had to have a scholarship. At BYU to get a scholarship -- I had to have a 3.9 or above. [Laughs] Which is basically, I think, most semesters I could get four A's and one A-. If I got two A-'s that was risky. And this is insane. And I knew I had to have it because I couldn't come back. Without that money, there was no way I was coming back. And so it was just terror. I just learned -- I did the homework obsessively. I did every extra credit thing. I did everything I could. When I took a math class, which was a bad idea [laughing], I just killed myself for that class. And I failed many of the exams. And then I made a deal with the professor that if I got 100%, missed nothing on the final, that he would forget all the other horrifying tests I'd taken and he would just score that one. And so just all I did for a month was just study for that exam. And I don't mean all I did, like, I studied an hour or two a day. I mean, that's all I did. And you know, that's one of the things for me -- getting a grant. I'd finally applied for FAFSA. It took this lovely Mormon bishop, like kind of equivalent of a pastor, who spent weeks trying to convince me that it wasn't evil to accept government money and I was very resistant to that. [Laughing] But eventually I filled out this application. A check came for $4,000. And I think that was the moment I stopped learning out of fear and started learning because I wanted to and I was interested in the material. And that was when the shift really started to take hold of being able to follow what felt compelling to me and what I wanted to learn and what I wanted to do. That little amount of money made such a difference to me. It's difficult to even compare the way that I studied and the way that I attended school and what school meant to me before that money and after that money are completely different. ^M00:18:12 >> Colleen Shogan: I think, for me, the most disturbing part of your book and your story stems from your relationship with your brother Shawn, who was certainly emotionally abusive and at times physical abusive towards you. As your education progressed, how did that inform you to help you understand that that relationship was a disfunctional one? >> Tara Westover: Yeah, I called the book Educated. And I think it's about education but it's not about degrees and it's not about certificates and it's not about the job that you can get if you have the right degree and the right certificate. I think it's about the ways that education makes you a different person and for me that took a lot of different shapes. One of the shapes it took was that I became someone that was able to have different ideas in my head than the people around me. And I'd never been that person before. I had grown up in an isolated intellectual environment where my father gave us the ideas that he wanted us to have because he believed that was the right thing for us, but that's essentially what he did. And so his version of history, his version of everything, that's what we learned. And that bled over in some ways. I was quite used to people telling me what had happened. So my brother Shawn, he would be violent. He would be not -- yeah, I was going to say aggressive but just flat out violent. And almost immediately after that would happen he would convince me that it hadn't happened or that it had been a game or that it had been this kind of fun experience. I mean, there were times that he would -- I mean, there's one example where he grabbed me by my hair and he hauled me down the hallway and he shoved my head in the toilet. And a friend of mine witnessed it. I was 17 so I actually had a friend. And later he said to me, Shawn said to me, "it's just a game" and "I thought we were having fun" and "if something was wrong you really should have told me." And I went to my friend, Charles, who'd seen it and tried to convince him that it was this game and he wasn't having it. And at some point in my time at BYU, and it wasn't too long later, that began to shift. And I began to have my own ideas about what was happening to me. And I think it was the same shift with my father. My father -- there was a time when I was at BYU that my father came and he was giving me this lecture about Jewish, basically about these conspiracy theories that run wild sometimes. He thought Jewish people were going to start World War III so they could consolidate their power and he had some pretty horrifying ideas about that. And I recognized some of the things he was saying because I'd taken that course in Jewish history. And I knew he was quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He didn't. He would have been horrified to think that he was quoting something that Hitler had liked. You know. But I knew the history of the text. I knew that it had been discredited as a forgery. I didn't know how he got hold of it, but I knew what it was and he didn't. It was the first time that I think I'd been able to hear my father speak with such confidence and authority in this voice that I'd trusted more than any other voice. And I was able to think to myself, "interesting that you think that but I don't, I don't think that." And it was the same switch that happened with my brother. Something changed where he would say to me -- there was a difficult incident in a parking lot where he essentially assaulted me and he cracked my wrist. I think he probably broke it. And it took months to heal. But within a few minutes of it or within a few hours he tried to convince me that it had been a game, that we were having a good time, that he hadn't had any idea that anything was wrong. And that was the first night that even though he told me that, what I wrote in my journal that night was I wrote my version of the events which was that it had been terrifying, that I'd been screaming at him to stop, that he really hurt me, that I had no idea why he was doing that but I had definitely asked him, I had told him not to. And then I wrote his version which was that it had been this fun, nice, little game. And I didn't know which one was right, like, would not have that moment. And within a couple of days I was prioritizing his, if I'm honest with you. It wasn't a complete progression but it was the first time, I think, that my brother attempted to pose his point of view, he attempted to dominate me in this very specific way, and at the end of that process there were still two minds present. There were two distinct minds present who had had two different experiences and I hadn't just yielded my interpretation of things or my experience of things to his. He had one idea of what happened and that was fine but I knew what I'd experienced. And I think education, it has to be more than something that you undertake to get a degree to get a better job. I think at its absolute best it needs to be the acquisition of the skills that allow you to live a fuller live, that allow you to participate in a meaningful way in the making of your own mind. And I think a part of that is just going to have to be learning and getting the opportunity to assess a wide variety of information and a wide variety of different perspectives and decide what you actually think. And that's how you develop that skill, that really crucial skill to have people in your life that you respect, that you admire, that you trust, that are important to you, but you don't necessarily have to just think whatever they think, that you can have your own thoughts and your own perspectives and it can be true of conspiracy theories about, you know, somewhat anti-Semitic conspiracy theories [laughing], or it can be the truth of your own life and what's happening to you. But I think that kind of independence of mind, that's what education should be about. And it should change the way that you live and interact with people, I think, if it's a real education. >> Colleen Shogan: As the story progresses -- oh, yeah. ^M00:23:51 [ Applause ] ^M00:23:55 As your story progresses, your educational achievements are building up. They proliferate. And your relationship with your family -- most of your family, not your entire family, most of your family -- deteriorates. So it becomes an inverse relationship. So when did you realize that these two things that were clearly very important to you, these two things weren't going to march in concert with each other? And how did you deal with that? >> Tara Westover: I think there's different kinds of realization. There's the realization that makes you, that you're actually aware. Then there's the realization that makes you repress. [Laughing] And I think there were a lot of years that I was aware of it in a way that made me not deal with it at all and just pretend like it wasn't happening. For my family, change was always going to be hard and one of the ways -- I said education should make you a different person and it made me a different person. It made me the kind of person who wasn't necessarily going to tolerate the behavior from my brother that I had been. And that was never going to go down well in my family. It took me a long time to realize that. It took me a long time to realize that there was nothing in the way that I approached my parents. There's nothing in the way that I said it. There's nothing in the way that I behaved that made them not accept that. They were just never going to and it was always going to be an issue. It's so easy in those situations to blame yourself and think, oh, if I'd said it in a different way. No. I don't think that was ever going to happen. And so there was going to be a point, I suppose, where that was going to come to a head. And I don't know when exactly I accepted it. I think probably I accepted it several years after it was true, actually. I think there was a lot of magical thinking there. There was a lot of thinking, I can say this, I can fix this. There was a lot of me thinking I can change people and of course you can't. You can't change other people. You can only change yourself and that's hard enough. And so I think it took me a long time. I confronted my parents about my brother. They immediately told him what I'd said. He disowned me. Then my parents developed this really lovely idea that I was possessed which was the way they tried to explain why I'd said what I said about him. And after a couple of years of that, I became estranged from them. And that was my choice. But even then I still thought I could fix it. And fundamentally it was because I wanted to believe that I could change them. I could make them into people that I could have in my life. And I couldn't. And so then I had a lot of guilt for a lot of years about that decision. I made a decision to walk away from them and then you feel like a bad person. You feel like a bad kid. You feel like -- are there any reasons that a child can walk away from their own parents? And for me for a long time I thought no, no, there are not. There are no reasons that make that OK. And those were some of my angriest years because I didn't feel like I deserved to have made that decision. So I was constantly relitigating in my mind every awful thing that they had done, everything I resented them for because I was trying to justify myself. And it took me a lot of years to realize, if I could just accept the decision on my own terms, that I did it for myself -- it was nothing to do with my father. It wasn't about whether he deserved it. It was just because I needed it. And once I made it about what I deserved, about valuing myself, and not about being angry with someone else, you know, things got a lot more peaceful and I no longer feel that need to just constantly relitigate everything that I dislike about my parents. I try to keep it in my mind because I don't want to go back and get in that situation again. But then I can also be someone who has good memories about my family and I can be someone who has beautiful memories. And that's important, I think. I lived my life for a couple of years as someone who had no good memories. Everything in my life had just turned to rot and range and anger because I was so mad at my parents for what had happened. And it's been a much nicer stage of life to get to the point where I value my past. And there was that time where I couldn't value it because it was painful to lose it. And I thought, well, I just have to say that it was all crap and it was all terrible and there's nothing good there and so I don't care that I've lost them because they were bad. And that was kind of painful because then I didn't have any good memories. And it was a long process to get to the point where I can say, "there was value there; the love was real; there were really wonderful things about them; and I've lost that and that was a decision and I stand by that decision for my own sake." But I don't have to devalue what I had just because I've lost it. And then I can be someone who had a beautiful childhood. I can also be someone who had a difficult childhood. >> Colleen Shogan: Last question before we turn it over for questions from the audience. So, can you catch us up on your life since you published the memoir? What do you have planned next? Are you writing another book? What's next for you professionally? >> Tara Westover: I am trying to put together a documentary about rural education. Rural kids tend to struggle a bit more transitioning from high school to the next stage. Whether that's trade school or university, they tend to struggle a bit more, I think especially because of the economic crisis. You know, small towns are sort of shrinking for the first time in the United States history and I think a lot because of big agriculture. Family farms are dying. So there's a struggle that's going on there that I saw when I was growing up that I've continued to see as I go back there that I kind of want to explore. >> Colleen Shogan: OK, terrific. I'm sure there's a lot of questions from our audience for Tara. If you have them, please, there's a number of microphones. ^M00:29:48 ^M00:29:51 >> Hi. I was curious. You address it at the end of your book but I was wondering since the book has, you know, gotten such rave reviews and become such a success, what your relationship is now with any members of your family, with your family, or what they think of it. >> Tara Westover: I would say with some I've gotten closer to them and with some it's been rocky. And I wouldn't have predicted who those people would be. There were people that I thought they were reading the book before I even agreed to publish it, they were happy with it, and then it's been a real struggle with them that it's become -- you know, we didn't think this would happen. This isn't necessarily what we signed up for. You know, me even. This is -- it's great but it's different than what I imagined. And then there are family members -- I have aunts and cousins that have been incredibly supportive that I wasn't expecting that kind of support from them. And so I feel like I've gained a lot of family from the process. But you know, it's a difficult thing, this kind of story. There's no way around it, I think. If you're going to tell stories about your life, it might be difficult for people. And it was difficult for me, in a way, the decisions that I made to write the book. And it's a process. So I would say in general pretty much the book -- people have responded the way that you would expect in a way but there have been some surprises. >> Hi. I was wondering if you had strong feelings about keeping your experiences from being replicated in other families, about homeschooling and your lack of education. >> Tara Westover: Yeah, the homeschooling one is a really difficult question because I think some people do a fantastic job homeschooling. My brother Tyler homeschools his children and I've never seen better adjusted, educated kids [laughs]. I've just never seen it. But I think that it's a difficult question. It's hard to regulate because you can't compare one family of kids. You know, you can't rank them. What do you rank them against? Do you rank them against the local school? And what if they have disabilities? And I don't have a policy solution for that. But I would try to give parents a bit of advice, I guess, which is I would say think about why you want to homeschool your kids. If the reason you want to homeschool your kids is because you want to keep them from getting access to points of view that you disagree with, I would say that's probably less about education and probably more about control. And but if you want to educate your kids because you really believe you can give them access to more points of view and more ideas and more ways of thinking about the world, I've seen that work. ^M00:32:38 ^M00:32:42 >> Hi. I loved your book. The whole time I was reading it, I wanted to know what was the moment or decision where you decided, "I should share this story" because obviously it's very personal. There could be repercussions. I come from a very similar background to you and that's kind of a question I deal with. What is the good of sharing it but also how it can be misunderstood or have, you know, blowback to the people you love or even are estranged from? So I'm just really interested in why you decided to write it and share it. >> Tara Westover: Yeah. I think the typical way to approach the book is to write a proposal or a couple chapters and sell that. You find a publisher with that. I couldn't do that and the reason I couldn't do that is because I had no idea if I would ever want the book to be published. And writing a couple chapters or writing an outline, I had no idea. I just didn't know if it was something that -- I felt like I had to be fully convinced that it would be a useful thing [laughing] before I would want to put it out there. And I couldn't do that until I'd written the whole thing. I had to write every word of it. And there were parts of it that were hard for me to write about that I didn't want people to know about. And in a way I needed the rest of the story arc for me to have the conviction. I think it was worth those things that I didn't really want to write. And I would never have -- you know, that scene in the parking lot that I described is not something I'm thrilled that people know about me. That's not fun. But there are other things that -- you know, there are other. There's the end of that chapter. And there's the realization of what it meant that is important to me. And I can't have one without the other. And I had to write the whole book and I had to say, on the whole, is this something I want out there? But any individual chapter, I guarantee you the answer would have been no. No, no, no, no. >> Well, thank you for writing it. [Laughter] ^M00:34:38 >> Colleen Shogan: As we watch you coming of age in the book, a theme that emerges is the difficulty surrounding romantic relationships. And as the book edges towards conclusion it's indicated that you formed a healthier relationship with a man. But that's kept pretty quiet. And I was curious about the choice not to talk more about the emergence of that relationship in the book and that portion of your coming of age. >> Tara Westover: Yeah, I thought about writing more about that and in the end I decided I just -- the book has so many things going on in it and so many themes. And I wanted to provide something that was useful to people who struggle with that because I did. At BYU, you know, I'd had this experience with my brother. He had a nickname for me that was -- it was "whore." That's not a nice name to call a 16-year-old girl. That had really entered into my self-definition in a way that would, combined with a lot of religious sexual guilt, really make relationships difficult for me when I was at BYU. And so I wrote about that in the best terms I knew how because I wanted people to see, to feel what that was like and to hopefully feel what it's like to let that go and to see where their own feelings come from. I didn't write -- you know, a lot of people do write memoirs about their kind of sexual coming of age and their lives like that. And I didn't feel like I had a lot to add. I felt like the other psychological things that I explore in the book -- the letting go of certain definitions that people have of you, the letting into your life of people who aren't the stereotype that you were taught. You know, I think so many of us form views about what people are like. Maybe we form a view -- and I did this -- of what men are like based on the men that we've had in our lives. And then we go out and we find people in our lives who are those men [laughing] and it then confirms the idea we have. Well, men are like this and then we're attracted to those people and so we surround ourselves with them. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I was lucky in that Drew wasn't like that and the men that I dated at BYU weren't like that. And slowly, by allowing people into my life, they allowed my ideas to change. And I wanted to show it that way. I didn't particularly feel the need to explore it in any other detailed way. I just wanted the idea to be this is the idea I had of myself and this is how it affected my ability to connect with people. And this is the way that that slowly was let go of. >> Thank you. ^M00:37:11 Hi. So, a fellow rural Idahoan. >> Tara Westover: Welcome. >> I was wondering. You were talking about your future project with the transition from rural education. And I was wondering, based on your own experience you talk about, you know, going to BYU, going to Cambridge, Harvard, talking to President Obama, all these things that there really isn't this model and you might feel like, whoa, this is happening to me. What kind of advice or how did you deal with jumping these hurdles that just keep getting higher and higher? >> Tara Westover: I don't know! [laughing] ^M00:37:53 [ Laughter ] ^M00:37:54 I kind of feel like -- I feel a bit like my life is a video game at the moment and things keep happening that I feel like will feel real eventually. But right now, you know, it's fun but it's kind of like I'm dreaming that these things are happening. And there's a weird feeling that it doesn't really matter what I do because it's a dream. [Laughing] And one of these days I'm going to wake up and realize, oh, no, that all actually happened. But no. I think change -- I've had a lot of experiences in my life where things have changed dramatically for me and I suddenly had to function in a new world. And I had that at BYU. And I had that at Cambridge. And I kind of thought that I was done with the catapult leaps and just arriving somewhere that I had no idea how to function. And then this happened. And it truly is one of the weirdest things that's ever happened to me [laughing]. And I don't have a strategy. I kind of -- my strategy is find things that make you feel like yourself and stay grounded and wait to catch up. You know, your brain will eventually catch up. And until then, try to remain calm. [Laughter] And that's what I'm doing right now. I am trying to remain calm. >> Thank you. >> Next question. >> In your book you go a lot into how you learned the good side of education. Through college you started learning more about the world. But that can be taken both ways in terms of people can become more like your brother and your father through experiences they have almost through bad education. What is your opinion on that? >> Tara Westover: I think sometimes it's bad education. Sometimes it's -- you know, I speculate that my father was bipolar and I don't think he got what he needed to deal with that. And then, of course, because he passes that on, my brother Shawn was raised in a stressful environment. He had injuries, a number of head injuries that he got from working for my dad that were never treated or mostly not treated. So I think, I don't know as though I would say if they got access to the kind of education that would have changed them. And maybe they wouldn't have changed. But I think -- I guess I do see it that way of I don't feel like they had the opportunities that they needed. And I feel like I did. And so I try not to judge them so harshly because they didn't get the chances that I got. And maybe they would have made different decisions and maybe there are reasons for that and you can go in that circle forever. But I just feel like, I don't know why they do the things that they do. I try not to be too judgmental. But I also try to have a clear line of what I'll tolerate for myself. So I won't necessarily put myself in that situation again, even though I try not to be so judgmental of why they are the way they are. >> Alright. Thank you. >> Hi. You just mentioned coming to kind of understand your father is potentially bipolar. Throughout the book, especially in the second half, you kind of describe a lot of experiences that are also consistent in yourself with PTSD and CTPSD. And I was wondering if you could talk a bit about, if you are willing, how you became aware of the kind of lasting impact that some of the things you went through had and the process of recovery. >> Tara Westover: Yeah. I think the whole concept of mental health is wildly under-discussed. It took me a really long time to recognize that I had symptoms of PTSD. I think I had written the book before that was apparent to me, actually. I think I probably had someone say it to me and I thought, oh yeah, that's quite obvious. [Laughing] Thank you. Yeah. No, I think I've always -- I resisted therapy violently for a really long time and now I love it. And I don't -- people say you have to have somebody really good and I think that's fine. I find it valuable to have anything, any excuse to sit down and deal with the things that otherwise you just repress and don't think about. I think it's for me a very good thing. Maybe other people think it's better to repress it but I think it's -- you take the health of your physical body seriously. So why not take the health of your mind? Like, why allow things that happened to you when you were a kid to determine your life for 40 years? Why do that? Just take it seriously and sort it out and liberate yourself from that. >> Thank you. >> Colleen Shogan: Time for one more question. >> OK. Hi. So something that was hard for me to read about in your book was how your family manipulated religion or religious language in their relationships. So I was wondering have you been able to find your own faith in God or spirituality? >> Tara Westover: Yeah. I put a note at the beginning of the book that says it's not a book about Mormonism and the reason I did that is because I didn't want people to use this story to caricaturize unkindly people of faith in general. My experience is people can be very kind and very empathetic or they can be very cold and very self-serving. And I haven't really noticed that religion is the determining factor for that. For my own beliefs, you know, I was raised in a very extreme religion and when I went to mainstream Mormon faith, I kind of converted to that for a while and that didn't sit perfectly with me either, mostly because of gender issues. And now I think for me the idea of faith has just had to bend a little bit. It's just had to change. And there's a really -- what I think of as one of the key chapters of the book which I've titled after Hebrews 11:1 -- or it might be Hebrews 1:11. And one of them is about a dog, so it's not that one. ^M00:43:37 [ Laughter ] ^M00:43:38 But the one is that faith is the substance of things, the essence of things not seen. And I think for anyone who's had a difficult life, who's had to say goodbye to important people in their life, who's trying to do those kind of difficult psychological things, I'm going to redefine what I think romantic relationships are. I'm going to redefine what I think family relationships are. A lot of times you have to believe in a world that is not seen, that you haven't experienced yet. And that is true of education and it's true of many other things where if you're reaching for something better and different than what you have, it is faith. That's what it is. It's faith in something that you haven't seen yet but you choose to believe in it. >> Colleen Shogan: Tara will be signing copies of her book downstairs later this afternoon. Please join me in thanking Tara Westover for joining us today. ^M00:44:26 [ Applause ]