I think reading an audiobook is a real skill - for one thing, you have to be able to do impressions and voices, which I cannot do - and it's just not a skill I have.
— Tara Westover
When I was 17, I went to Brigham Young University. That was the first time I had set foot in a classroom.
I think for people who are inside these relationships that are really hard to leave, there is always a compelling reason to stay. It's not that they are wholly bad people.
I taught myself algebra and a little grammar, and somehow I scraped a high enough score on the ACT to be admitted to Brigham Young University, even though I had no formal education.
I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley, and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring.
I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.
I didn't even have a birth certificate until I was 9 years old, which meant that, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I just didn't exist.
I didn't know if I would ever reconcile with my family, and I needed to believe that I could forgive, regardless.
Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.
So, I was born and raised the youngest of seven children on this really beautiful mountain in Southern Idaho. But my dad had some radical beliefs. And because of those beliefs, we were isolated. So I was never allowed to go to school or to the doctor.
Psychologically, when you hear something a number of times, you start to believe it.
I didn't read much in high school, maybe because I didn't go to high school. Instead, I worked.
My family always spent the warm months bottling fruit for storage, which Dad said we'd need in the Days of Abomination.
My older brother bought textbooks and was able to teach himself enough to go to college. When I was 16, he returned and told me to do the same thing.
I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.
I have books I like very much, but I don't think there are any books that everyone should read. I prefer a world in which some people read this, and others read that.
It was a quality of my childhood that everything had these two sides. Even though things could be really beautiful and peaceful one moment, they could also be a bit chaotic or maybe terrifying in another.
We think love is noble, and in some ways, it is. But in some ways, it isn't. Love is just love. And sometimes people do terrible things because of it.
I don't really feel like I belong anywhere.
We'd had books in my house growing up, but we had never had anything like lectures. I had never written an essay for my mother. I had never taken an exam. Because I was working a lot as a kid, I just hadn't elected to read that much.
At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.
Because I never attended elementary schools of any kind, I missed most of the books that were popular with other kids my age. There was an exception, however, which was 'Harry Potter.' My grandmother gave me the first book when I was about 13, and I read it, then read all the rest.
My loyalty to my father had increased in proportion to the miles between us.
I had been raised in the mountains of Idaho by a father who distrusted many of the institutions that people take for granted - public education, doctors and hospitals, and the government.
I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood.
I get up when I feel like getting up. That's the deal I've made with myself: I can stay in bed as long as my dog's bladder holds. The other half of that deal is that once the dog is walked, the very next thing I do is write. It's mechanical. It's programming, very nearly brainwashing.
There was a lot of beauty in my childhoood.
I read a handful of memoirs to get a sense of what the genre meant. I needed to learn the fundamentals of the craft. I had never written a word of narrative. What is a tense shift, what is point of view? I didn't know any of it.
During my first semester of college, I raised my hand in a class and asked the professor to define a word I didn't know. The word was holocaust, and I had to ask because, until that moment, I had never heard of it.