![]() And yet, professors saw potential in her. She also didn’t understand fractions, let alone algebra, and she didn’t know what “biology” meant before she registered for a class in it. Timid and confused, she humiliated herself in class when she didn’t know what the Holocaust was. Q&A: BYU grad and ‘Educated’ author Tara Westover talks difference between forgiveness and reconciliation.BYU grad, ‘Educated’ author Tara Westover talks family estrangement, writing memoir.“Our home school is as good as any public education.” She was 17 when she went to Brigham Young University, and said she was unprepared for a world where fellow Latter-day Saints owned running shorts and imbibed caffeinated sodas. ![]() Tara applied to college against her father’s will, although he put on a good face when she was admitted, “It proves one thing at least,” he said, according to the book. Val rarely allowed Tara time to study from books other than religious texts. They lived off the grid in a remote area beneath Buck’s Peak, near Clifton, 12 miles from the nearest small city of Preston. The family eschewed birth certificates, driver’s licenses, insurance and anything else that might leave a paper trail for the government. Val raised the children on frightening tales of the federal raid on Ruby Ridge, and had them fill bug-out bags for the promised day when armed SWAT teams would come for them, too. Mother LaRee treated their frequent burns, breaks and lacerations with oils, tinctures and salves. Her father Val repeatedly put the family at risk. She worked the family business - a dangerous scrap salvage yard where the children dodged metal and teetered perilously on beams and forklifts. The youngest in the family, Tara says she was beaten and terrorized by her older brother (identified by the pseudonym Shawn in the book), who dragged her by the hair, choked her, twisted her limbs and verbally assaulted her while her parents turned a blind eye. Tara’s story is artfully told and unrelentingly horrific. I drove to Clifton, Idaho, to document the kind of tragedies which precede estrangement, but I also wanted to understand whether reconciliation is still possible. Other data indicate 40% of people will experience some form of family estrangement during their lifetime. And nearly 1 in 4 American adults today say they are either not speaking with a family member or have a family member who refuses to speak with them, according to a recent Deseret News/Harris-X survey. Such circumstances often lead to long-term estrangement. Family stories, of course, are complicated - and they are also heartrending when trauma or allegations of abuse are involved. The family agreed to let me visit their home in Clifton, Idaho, to share the stories they say lead to a house still divided nearly five years to the day that the book made its debut. She was the child who survived abuse and neglect in the remote mountains of southern Idaho, who scrabbled her way out of nonexistent “home schooling” to BYU, to Cambridge, to Harvard, to a doctoral degree to a book on The New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, to gripping interviews with Oprah and Ellen.Īnd then there is the rest of the sprawling Westover family, many of whom don’t recognize themselves on the pages of the manuscript that was dropped off anonymously. Soon there would be scarcely a literary circle or neighborhood book club that wasn’t buzzing about first-time author Tara Westover. Barack Obama and Bill Gates would declare it among their favorites that year. Within months of publication in 2018, the fame of the book “ Educated” would spread around the world - eight million copies sold, in 45 languages and a spot on all the major “best-of” lists. The Westovers had heard talk, enough to dread what was written about them - horrific stories of abuse, sibling-on-sibling violence, primitive homeopathic remedies for life-threatening accidents, scathing harangues from an end-of-days father, a doormat mother who failed to protect her young. ![]() The first the Westover family saw of the book that would rip apart their lives was a copy of the manuscript, left anonymously one night on the seat of a family truck. Those seeking resources or help concerning child abuse or neglect can contact the Division of Child and Family Services, including through an intake hotline at 1-85. Editor’s note: The following article discusses allegations of child abuse.
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