How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S2, Ep7 How to Fail: Tara Westover

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

This week, I bring you a truly incredible woman. Her name is Tara Westover. She wrote a memoir called Educated, which is quite simply one of the best books I have ever read: profound, moving, unerringly original. It tells the story of Westover's upbringing, born the seventh child of Mormon survivalist parents who didn't believe in public schooling or mainstream medicine. It wasn't until she was 17 that Westover decided to educate herself - with astonishing results.We talk about what it's like to love your family but to be estranged from them, and how the two ideas can co-exist. We also discuss how on earth someone teaches themselves algebra ('Yeah,' says Westover, 'that wasn't fun') and what it was like to refuse any pain medication despite having a dental abscess. Her failures include flunking tests, finding it difficult to make friends, her failure to believe in her family's religion even though she wanted to and her failure to make her relationship with her parents work. She also quotes John Stuart Mill on feminism and it's completely brilliant.This was one of those very special interviews where I felt my mind expanding just from the privilege of listening to her speak. I hope you enjoy it too. How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Chris Sharp and sponsored by 4th Estate Books Educated by Tara Westover is out now published by Penguin Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayTara Westover @tarawestoverChris Sharp @chrissharpaudio4th Estate Books @4thEstateBooks     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better.

I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. This week on How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I'm joined by Tara Westover. Westover was born sometime in September 1986, but didn't have a birth certificate until the age of nine. She was the seventh child of Mormon survivalist parents who believed the end of days were coming and whose fervent mistrust of the government meant that Westover and her siblings received no formal education, had no medical records and scant reading material other than the Bible. had no medical records and scant reading material other than the Bible. As a child, Westover worked on her father's junkyard in rural Idaho and then, at the age of 17, against her parents' wishes,

she stepped inside a classroom for the first time. She went on to gain a PhD in history from Cambridge University and a visiting fellowship at Harvard. But this was a journey that came at immense personal cost. Westover is now estranged from her family. This year, she published her extraordinary memoir, Educated, which is quite simply one of the best and most dazzling books I have ever read. Barack Obama thinks so too. He chose Educated for his summer reading list. My life was narrated for me by others, Westover writes. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs. Tara, welcome. Thank you so much for agreeing to appear. I am a huge fangirl of Educated and I

tweeted about it when I read it and then Tara and I got in touch over Twitter and then I was manically obsessively getting in touch with your UK publicist to have you on the podcast. So I'm thrilled that we're meeting. And that quote that I read about it never occurring to you that your voice was as strong as theirs. I wonder if you could tell us how you set about finding your voice. Hmm, interesting. I think it was a long process of education, which is maybe an odd answer. I titled the book Educated. A lot of people query that with me.

Why that kind of institutionalized word. And I would say it's because I don't think of it as an institutionalized thing, education. I think that we think of it as an institutionalized thing because it becomes so integral to how people, you know, you get a degree to get a better job, make more money and career and all of that. I think it certainly can do that. But another thing that it does is teach you how to think for yourself and how to have your own ideas. And that's what it was for me. It kind of made me into a different person. So I felt like education and this whole idea of what it means to be educated actually should be reclaimed from this idea of being institutionalized.

So I wanted to title the book that. But how I went about it, I don't know. I mean, I enrolled in a university when I was 17. I'd never gone to school before that. So I was 17 the first time I set foot in a classroom. And all of a sudden, the world opened up and there were all these different perspectives because I had been raised in a family that didn't believe in doctors, didn't believe in education. You know, we were kind of isolated. I didn't have friends in my hometown because my family lived in this really extreme way. So it was just my family. That was my worldview. And then all of a sudden, when I was 17, that got busted kind of wide open. And I think my experience was extreme, but I think everybody

has that experience to some degree or another. I happen to think that our families build our world for us when we're children. They just kind of create us and they create our reality and they create everything about us. And then part of what it means to grow up is coming into contact with other worlds and other ideas and having to make decisions about what you're going to keep from that first world that you were given and what you're going to let go of and what the implications are of that kind of change for your relationships. Because it strikes me that Educated is about the stories that other people tell of who you are and then identifying and inventing your own narrative in contrapoint to that. And I wonder how difficult it was for you, given that you were growing up in a family who

you loved, to strike out on your own, knowing that they disagreed with it. How much guilt did you feel when you started to go to class? Kind of a lot. My parents didn't want me to go. My father especially didn't really want me to go. And so I did feel a lot of guilt about going. I don't know how I justified that to myself. I think I just felt bad is the answer to that question. The book is a lot about memory. It's a lot about the fallibility of memory, I suppose. But I would say I'm actually less interested in this whole exploration of the past and arguing about the past and what happened in the past. I think we should take it as a given that memory is fallible. And then the interesting question becomes what happens?

What do we do in the present knowing that? And I think it tends to become a question of power and of voices and not of whether memory is fallible but of whose fallible memory gets listened to. And I had a loving family. I had parents who cared about us, who were, I genuinely think, doing the best that they could, or were doing what they thought was right, even if from the outside it looks very different. It looks like maybe they weren't being very good parents. I think they were trying to be good parents. There was in my household at least that sense that adults got to decide what had happened,

and they interpreted for you what was happening. And then after the fact would tell you, you know, before, during, and after, it was all their perspective. And your perspective, you were a child, so it didn't really matter. And I think, again, for me, part of what it meant to grow up was saying, right, I'm not a memory fundamentalist. I don't think that I know more than everybody else. And I don't think that my memory fundamentalist. I don't think that I know more than everybody else. And I don't think that my memory is perfect. But I do feel like my perspective has to be a little bit valid because I am a person. So I think that part of me for me growing up was gaining that kind of first

an awareness that my perspective could be different from someone else's and not just, well, if they think this, then I must be wrong. But the ability to actually say you think this and I think something else and your interpretation of the family and of us not going to school is this and my interpretation is different and allowing yourself to occupy that space. And you didn't just not go to school, you worked in a junkyard, as I said in the introduction, but that doesn't quite convey the visceral danger of what you were doing. And I think one of the really beautiful things in the book is that your childhood was really quite dangerous because your parents specifically, your father didn't believe in going to hospitals after horrible

car accidents. And yet, your way of tackling that ultimately was to introduce ideas like dangerous, quote unquote, dangerous ideas into your life. But can you tell us a bit about the junkyard and the accidents? Yeah, and this is a funny one to talk about because my dad, I think that, again, people want to see him as a straightforward villain, and I don't think of him that way at all. He didn't have that bone in his head that everybody else seems to have that says, this is dangerous, don't do this. Or even after someone had been horribly injured, he didn't have that bone that says, don't do it again.

You know, so he just had this kind of bizarre belief that nothing would go wrong and that God wouldn't allow anything to go wrong and that if God allowed it, then it must be, that was what was supposed to happen. So he ran a junkyard and he ran a construction business. And we never wore hard hats. We would be in the air roofing 30 feet in the air, no safety harnesses, running around on beams. It just never occurred to him that these things could go badly. But the reality is they did very often go badly.

And people would get really injured. And then because my dad believed that doctors and hospitals have been corrupted by the Illuminati and that if you took a pharmaceutical that it would kind of damage you beyond repair for the rest of your life. He believed if you took a pharmaceutical that your children's children would be suffering the effects of it, you know. So there's no medicine of that kind in our house. I think it's hard for people to understand the depth of his belief in this. It wasn't the case that he was terribly safe with himself and then denied us those safety precautions. And it wasn't the case that if he was ill or injured that he gave himself medical care and then denied it

to us. He really believed what he was doing. And it's hard to convince people, but if you believe what my dad believed, denying medical care to your children is what love looks like. That might not be what it feels like. And that might not mean that it's healthy or good. But I think in his case, with the particular strange way he saw the world, I think it kind of was. And I think the only evidence, really the best evidence I can give for this kind of bizarre claim I'm making is the worst injury that ever happened in my father's junkyard happened to my father. And so he was removing a fuel tank from a car. And because he is the way he is, he just made this decision that there was no need to drain the fuel first. You know, pansy liberals do that. He, of course, lit this cutting torch and a spark made it into

the gas tank and the car exploded. And he was burned really badly. And, you know, his hands, he would never regain the full use of his right hand. His face would be changed dramatically. And he nearly died. And my parents, because of what they believed, made the decision to treat that at home without any morphine, without anything. So, again, it's not the case that he put us through things that he wouldn't go through himself. The beliefs were sincere. And it would take me a long time, I think, as part of my education, as part of developing my own ideas about the world,

to begin to understand there can be a difference between intention and effect. People can intend to be good parents and can in actuality be kind of toxic parents. That doesn't mean that the love isn't real and it doesn't mean that they're not good people, but it might mean that you have to make some decisions about what the boundaries are that you're going to have in your life for your own well-being. Not because they're bad people, but because you want to take care of yourself. We are going to get onto your failures in a minute, but I also just want to touch on how enormous a deal it was for you to educate yourself in the conventional sense. Because when you stepped into that classroom for the first time, age 17, you didn't know what algebra was. You had to teach yourself algebra.

Yeah, that wasn't fun. People ask me a lot, why did I have the conviction to do that? Why did I do that? I don't really have a very good answer to that question, which I think they would like because they want to understand how to motivate students and all the rest of it. But I think in as much as I have an answer, I think it's that I had had an older brother who, when I was 12, had introduced me to opera, and I loved music. And it was really clear to me from the first time I heard an aria that that was a type of singing that you didn't just learn how to do.

Someone knew how to do that, and you had to go find them, and they had to teach you how to do that. I think it was probably the first time I thought there might be something worth leaving this mountain for that I'd grown up on. That was kind of my world, and I was happy in it. And that was the first time I thought there might be something worth leaving this mountain for that I'd grown up on. That was kind of my world, and I was happy in it. And that was the first time I thought, maybe there's something else. And I had no idea what a university was. I'd never been in a classroom. I had no idea what an education was. I had no idea about any of it.

But I did get up every morning at 6 a.m. before I worked for my father in the junkyard, and I would study algebra and try to teach myself algebra so I could take the ACT so I could go to the university. I don't think it's a stretch to say that I taught myself algebra because I love to sing, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but I don't know if there's a lesson to extract from that except that I loved music so I learned algebra. So I went to college, I went to Brigham Young University and And at Brigham Young University, I discovered history and philosophy and loved that. And then because I loved that, I went to Cambridge. And when I was at Cambridge, I discovered language, which is a lot of how I came to write the book. So like I said, I'm not sure there's a lesson to extract in any clean way. But in as much as there is one, I think it might be something like maybe we should be a little bit careful before we destroy any passions in a child

or allow anyone to destroy our passions because you don't really know where your passions might take you but you know that having no passion will probably take you nowhere. I think of passion as a love of hard work because you love what you're doing or you love what you're working toward and it's that thing that kind of enervates you. So yeah whenever I see someone kind of pushing a child away from something they really love towards something that someone in their life benignly thinks will be a better career or something, I tend to think, let them see where this makes them go. Because as I said, I ended up doing a whole bunch of other things, but the whole impetus was just this, I like to sing.

There is an extraordinary passage in your memoir where you talk about sitting in a history lecture at Brigham Young and where you came across a word that you didn't recognise and you are going to read that passage for us now. Then the projector showed a peculiar image of a man in a faded hat and overcoat. Behind him loomed a concrete wall. He held a small paper near his face, but he wasn't looking at it. He was looking at us. I opened the picture book I'd purchased for the class so I could take a closer look.

Something was written under the image in italics, but I couldn't understand it. It had one of those black hole words right in the middle, devouring the rest. I'd seen other students ask questions, so I raised my hand. The professor called on me, and I read the sentence aloud. When I came to the word, I paused. I don't know this word, I said. What does it mean? There was silence. Not a hush, not a muting of the noise, but utter, almost violent silence. No paper shuffled, no pencil scratched. The professor's lips tightened. Thanks for that, he said, then returned to his notes. I scarcely moved for the rest of the lecture. I stared at my shoes, wondering what had happened,

and why, whenever I looked up, there was always someone staring at me as if I was a freak. Of course I was a freak, and I knew it, but I didn't understand how they knew it. When the bell rang, Vanessa shoved her notebook into her pack. Then she paused and said, You shouldn't make fun of that. It's not a joke. She walked away before I could reply. I stayed in my seat until everyone had gone, pretending the zipper on my coat was stuck so I could avoid looking anyone in the eye. Then I went straight to the computer lab to look up the word Holocaust.

Thank you so much, Tara. I think that really brings it home to us just the vastness of the journey that you are having to make let's get on to your failures it's very exciting for me this because this is the first time that i don't know in advance what my interviewees failures are it's an exercise in discovery for me and i'm excited what what is your first failure the first one i thought of was one i think probably a few people might relate to, which is I failed miserably my first test I ever took at BYU, Brigham Young University. I mean, I'd only ever taken one test before, and it was the ACT. What is the ACT?

It's the kind of college entrance exam you have to take. There's two of them in the U.S., the SAT and the ACT. And I took the ACT. That was my first test. Then I got to college and I had to take another test, unfortunately, one of many. And this one, I had it in my head that all tests were multiple choice because the ACT had been multiple choice. It was my only test. This test I took was on music and civilization and art. And it was a blue book test that you

had to write things. And I just had no idea how to do that. No clue. I'd never written an essay before. I'd never taken any kind of other exam besides the ACT. I completely failed that test. It wasn't a close call. It was, I think, again, we internalize our failures sometimes in ways that are really unhelpful.

So it wasn't the case that I kind of stepped outside of my body and said, oh, well, I've never been to school and I've never taken a test before, so I should cut myself some slack and give myself some time to learn how to do this. No, no, no. I completely internalized it as I'm not smart. I'm not good at this. I can't, I don't even know why I'm even trying. Like that kind of way of internalizing it. Whereas now I look back and think, yeah, you were always going to fail your first test. That was just going to happen because of the life that I'd had. When you talk about internalizing that failure, I think this is a difficult question to answer because we are both women, so we don't have

another experience. But do you think that sort of internal criticism is a particularly female way of dealing with failure? Probably. Well, actually, I'm not sure. I think the fact of internalizing failure is just human. But I think it's possible that the way that that internalizing happens is different with men and women. I think on the way it looks on the outside, I think the internal process, it seems to me, is the same in that thinking there's something wrong with me.

I think that's just how everyone responds. And then I think women probably respond to that a little bit differently than men, that inner criticism. I think sometimes some men, not all men, but some men can respond to it by being a little bit more confident or more arrogant on the outside. Almost the more, it seems to me that almost the more insecure they feel on the inside the more obnoxious they become on the outside and I think most women probably internalize that it looks different when it passes through them it comes out more looking like what it actually is probably than with men some men I know it seems to take the opposite and I guess part of the reason you were internalizing it is because at that stage in your life you were feeling very isolated you had left your home and your family and you write and

educated about how it was difficult to make a connection with your flatmates because you were dressed in a very kind of covered way because of how you'd been raised and you went through what was essentially a breakdown didn't you it was also kind of a strange person like I said I'd never had any friends because all the kids in my town went to school except for a breakdown, didn't you? I was also kind of a strange person. Like I said, I'd never had any friends. All the kids in my town went to school except for me. So they didn't really want much to do with me. I never went to their house. They never came to mine. I had been raised in this family that was quite strange.

They're lovely, but they're a bit strange. And so I was a bit strange. And I didn't know. I'd never had to have a conversation with someone not in my family. You know, I'd never met someone. I'd known everyone in in my family. You know, I never met someone. I'd known everyone in my town from the time I was born. I was related to half of them. And even those people I'd never spent a lot of time with.

It was my immediate family. So the really basic, hi, I'm Tara, how are you? What did you do this weekend? Blah, blah, blah. I didn't know how to have those conversations. I completely failed at them. I would arrive early to lectures, and I remember I would listen to people having having those chat and I would just write them down, you know, this is golden, you know, this like, oh, were you out in the rain last night? Kind of just this like chat

that I had no idea how to do. And so, yeah, my housemates found me to be extremely strange and rightly so they weren't wrong. Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, historian and host of a new chapter of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Join me and world-leading experts every week as we explore the incredible real-life history that inspires the locations, the characters and the storylines of Assassin's Creed. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online. It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo. All the time.

So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions, if you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second, then join me, Hunter Harris, and me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mass, we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when. You are so messy for that, but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise. Mother. A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your

podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. And you had dental issues because of how you've been raised to sort of refuse to take drugs for ages yeah well my parents had a dentist that they'd sent us to who didn't believe in novocaine or painkillers he believed in acupuncture and he was just kind of crazy and so all the work that he did which wasn't not a lot of work i've had to have redone since because he was just kind of a bit of a crack i have to say you do have great teeth. Well, actually, I have my older brother to thank for that because my family has a genetic issue where our canines don't drop down properly. They actually turn sideways and, brace yourselves for

this, come out under your nose. Oh my god. It's a very bad condition to have. So this happened to my older brother, Sean, when he was 25 and he had to go find a surgeon and remove the teeth that were coming out under his nose. Then the surgeon said, this is genetic. Do you have any siblings? And he's like, yeah, I have six siblings. And so he went and told my parents, we should probably do something about this will be cheaper now than later. And so I was carted off to a dentist and they said, oh, she has this. And so weirdly enough, my family who are super anti everything government, nothing to do with doctors, no hospitals, I got braces because of what had

happened to my older brother. But when you were at Brigham Young, this is one of the most visceral passages of the book. And I just see it in my memory about you having extraordinary tooth pain and refusing almost as a challenge to yourself to take the drugs on offer and it sort of prompted a bit of a meltdown I'd never taken a pharmaceutical because I'd been told it caused infertility I'd been told the spirit of God would leave your body I'd been told it would affect your children's children you know so me, and this is an ibuprofen we're talking about, it's not like an intense drug. So I had this boyfriend at the time, the first normal person I'd ever even kind of been friends with. And I had this terrible, terrible toothache, terrible, terrible problems. And I mean, I think it started initially with this boyfriend I had a really bad earache and then later it was a toothache but in both cases I just found it

incredibly difficult to take anything for the pain because I just thought that it was a wicked thing to do and that's not a Mormon thing that was very much a my dad thing but the effect on me was the same where I just felt like I can't do this. It would be evil to do this. But you did do it. Eventually, with the tooth, I mean, I had that toothache. I needed root canal is what it was, and I had that toothache for a couple months. And eventually, I think the nerve died before I actually managed to get to a dentist and get it taken care of. That was actually more about money than painkillers. I mean, at that point in my life, finally with the tooth, I was taking painkillers because it was really painful. And

I had been persuaded by my boyfriend to try them once and my eyes hadn't fallen out and my tongue hadn't turned black. Nothing had happened. So I decided that maybe ibuprofen was okay. But you know, if you have a nerve and your tooth is dying, ibuprofen is not going to cut it. It's not going to do anything for you. I hate to tell everyone out there, not going to do it. As you're talking, it just strikes me that educated is a lot about outsidership, feeling an outsider in your own family and then feeling an outsider in the new world that you'd found yourself in. Did you feel like a fraud at university or did you have that kind of imposter syndrome that a lot of people experience?

I think maybe a bit. It's a funny thing. I agree with most of the way you phrased that. There's one small change I would make, I guess, which is I would say I felt like I belonged in my family. I always felt like I belonged in my family. I've been raised by them. I agreed with them about everything. I had full membership in that. Probably the only group I've ever felt like I fully belonged to. The reason I left wasn't because I didn't feel like I belonged. It was because there was something I wanted on the outside. There was maybe this small part of me that seemed a tiny bit different from everybody else, and I wanted something. I wanted to learn how to sing, or I wanted to go see what was going on outside of the family.

But for me, the negotiation was always, here's a place I belong naturally, and yet when I'm there, I feel like there's something missing, and I can go find that missing thing, and then I lose the belonging. So there was a tension between growing up, having my own ideas, thinking the things I thought, or having my family. It would be that kind of decision. But I think the belonging, I could absolutely have belonged there. I just would have had to never change, and I would have had to never grow up. I don't think every family is like that. I think some families have a capacity for the people in it to change and to grow up and have different ideas and still they find a way to be cohesive. But my family didn't have that flexibility. We just weren't able to do that.

Tell me about your second failure. My second failure is a super weird one. Is it weirder than having teeth coming out of your nose? Possibly. I never actually had that. I was lucky we got to it first. My second failure is a failure to believe in the religion of my parents. It's probably strange to describe it as a failure,

but it felt like a failure because I wanted to really badly, and I was trying really hard. When I was at Brigham Young University, it was a Mormon university. My family are kind of extreme Mormons, obviously, and then mainstream Mormons are very different. They believe in doctors and hospitals and all the rest of it. So as I moved towards the mainstream, I became more of a mainstream Mormon, and there was a gap between me and my family because I was taking ibuprofen. But we still believed in this Mormon church. And that was nice that we had that overlap. But we still shared that. But then as I progressed towards graduation at BYU, I just started realizing that I didn't believe it anymore. And it was a hard lesson for me to

realize that belief, and I think maybe especially religious belief, it's actually not a choice in any meaningful sense. You can't will yourself to believe that the sky is pink. You can tell yourself it is, but your brain knows you're lying. I just found myself in that position with the church. I wanted to believe the sky was pink, and I was telling myself the sky was pink all the time. And I still knew the sky was blue. I really wanted to believe, and I was telling myself the sky was pink all the time and I still knew the sky was blue. I really wanted to believe and I didn't and suddenly had to realize that faith is not a choice in the sense of other things about you that you can choose. You can choose not to expose yourself to things that might change your ideas, but once you've exposed yourself, you can't actually go

back. Was that frightening for you? It was. you've exposed yourself, you can't actually go back. Was that frightening for you? It was. I'd never met anyone who wasn't Mormon before, which is kind of weird to say, but I really hadn't. I'd gone from this very isolated upbringing in my family to Brigham Young University, which was, like I said, I'm sure I'd met people checking out at Walmart or something by that time that weren't Mormon, but someone whose name I knew. No, I'd never met someone who was not Mormon.

And so the whole idea of this outside world, and I kind of had this idea in my head that Mormons were the only good people. You know, everybody else was going to steal from you or going to hurt you in some way. Yeah, it was terrifying to suddenly think, I have a belief now that separates me from every person I have ever met, and not really knowing what that was going to mean going forward. Was part of your questioning of your faith not just an intellectual one, but an emotional one, given what you had undergone as a child, the experiences that you'd had, you write in Educated very movingly of being violently abused by your older brother, Sean, and trying to talk to your parents about that years later and them

not being able to hear that. Did you feel let down on a personal level by Faith as well? I don't think so, actually. I'm sure I had all kinds of conflicting, confusing ideas about myself and about who was responsible and who should have helped and all the rest of it. And mostly I probably just thought it was my fault at that time. But my conception of God, you know, my dad had this very Old Testament kind of severe power-mad idea of God, I would say. And then when I moved into BYU and spent more time with mainstream Mormons, they have a much more New Testament idea of God. He's just nicer in the kind of mainstream, and he's less about punishing and more about loving, and it's a better version. I gravitated toward that quickly, and then I think I was probably confused for a few years about what

my ideas about God were. Was he this angry, possessive Old Testament God, or was he this new kind of loving, fatherly God? But I did feel like whatever was happening with—it's not as though I thought, oh, in heaven there will be these kinds of relationships, you know, that was going off me and my brother, that would continue. So I didn't connect it with God. I definitely thought it was an earthly failing that would be rectified one day. I don't remember that particular relationship entering into my ideas about God very much. For me anyway, what it would come down to is the mainstream Mormon church hasn't practiced polygamy for a very long time. They've stopped the practice of it in the last century, but they also don't reject the doctrine either.

So as a young girl in the Mormon church, you're very much brought up with the spiritual belief in it, which is to say you're taught that in the afterlife you will be a plural wife. You'll be one of many. So it's a huge part of the religion, even if they don't practice it anymore. That was something I'd grown up with. It seemed completely normal to me. And yet I, like many other young Mormon women, thought about this a lot as a kid. There's just something upsetting about imagining the afterlife.

And I've known Mormon women who have dreaded paradise for that reason, because to them, it sounds really kind of awful. So I think for me, it was almost an intellectual exercise. I started working out what my ideas of God were. And I decided if I was going to worship God, he couldn't just be powerful, he had to be good. And I took a lot of this from John Stuart Mill. I thought, God, he has these great passages where he says, God's ways can be different from ours in a quantitative sense, but they can't be different in a qualitative sense. That old argument that people say, we can't judge God because his ways are higher than our ways. It's like an ant trying

to explain to an ant how to operate a television. And yeah, his response was, yes, that can be true in a quantitative way, but it can't be true in a qualitative way. So ethically, you can't have a God that shows up and says, actually, murdering children is now the right thing to do, and helping old people is now bad. You know, it has to be recognizably moral. He says, if it's not recognizably moral, then basically what you're doing is you're worshiping power. And worshiping power is enslaving. You have to have an internal sense of what you think good is, and then you worship good. You can't just worship power.

And that made a lot of sense to me. And then I started thinking about, okay, if God is good, do I think a good God would design an afterlife for women that is this? Do I think a good God would promote these kind of relationships? Do I think a good God would rank women as less? And it just began to be very clear to me that he wouldn't. That was when I suppose I stopped believing. And again, it wasn't a choice. I just realized I had developed through my reading and thinking a strong idea of what I thought good was and a strong idea of what I thought power was. And I had developed an inability to believe in power and I had to believe in good. It wasn't a choice anymore.

I simply didn't believe in an afterlife where women were part of that 10 women to one man. I just didn't believe in it. It sounds as if it's also part of your journey to understanding your own womanhood. And it's interesting that you talk about John Stuart Mill because I wrote down this quote that you talk about John Stuart Mill, because I wrote down this quote that you talk about reading for the first time in your memoir, about women having

been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations. And I love that quote, because it seems so resonant for modern times. And I just wanted to talk a bit to you about that, about your identity as a woman and how you forged it. Yeah, he has that great line where he says, you know, of the nature of women, nothing final can be known for all those reasons that you said, because we've put so much contorting pressure on them for so long that we have no idea what they would be if we just left them alone. And I just love that idea of just saying, I mean, I grew up in a place where a lot was thought to be known about women.

And there were all these attributes that were male. You know, if you were aggressive, if you were destructive, if you were competitive, then these were male attributes. And if you were submissive and nurturing and caring, then these were female attributes. And I don't know how you feel like you fall on that spectrum. But I feel I like nurturing occasionally, but I think I'm more competitive than I am nurturing. I really do. I think I'm a little bit more aggressive than I am submissive. As a kid, that was just confusing to me.

I just kind of felt like I was a little bit distorted or there's something wrong with me because here was what I was supposed to be like and here's what I was actually like. supposed to be like, and here's what I was actually like. And here's this whole kind of maybe third or half or three quarters of my personality that I was being told was definitionally not what I was. And it's a weird thing to be told that something about you is definitionally wrong. And Mill was saying the opposite. He was saying, you are a woman, so whatever you are must be female by definition. There's no point arguing that there's something that's, you know, whatever you are, you're a woman, something that's, you know, whatever you are, you're a woman and that's what a woman is then. We just have to go with it. And he had that great idea that he was arguing against laws that were put in place, you know, women can only do

certain kinds of careers or have certain kinds of jobs. And the defense for those laws was that it was unnatural for them to do those jobs. And Mel sort of, I thought, in a rather devastating way, pointed out that that made no sense and just said if it's unnatural for them to do them why do you need a law like if it's against nature then we don't need you need laws against things or to me all this was like yeah actually why are we letting other people define and that includes women who say women have to be this or i just think don't let anybody tell you what you're supposed to be by definition that way lies trouble good old John Stuart Mill

I like Mel so woke a lot of feminists really don't like Mel but I like Mel what's your third failure my third failure is kind of heavy one it's that I failed to make my relationship work with my parents. That's another thing. I say it as a failure. I don't necessarily see it as a failure now, but I experienced it as a failure. So I talk about it that way. There was a really long time in my life when I was working through this kind of process of estrangement. Because estrangement is a process. I don't know anybody who becomes estranged from their parents, you know, on a day or even a week or even a month.

It takes years. And I was working through this process of kind of coming to terms with the situation. It felt so much like every other person that I know is able to do this and I'm not able to do it. So the problem must be with me. I think we feel that way for a couple of reasons. I think one reason we feel that way is I don't think we know actually how prevalent it is that people aren't able to succeed at this particular thing. I think estrangement is one of those things very few people want to talk about, or there's a whole subset of people who've had incredibly dysfunctional backgrounds and are very, very damaged by them. And they talk about it all the time and we don't necessarily want to be in that group,

so the rest of us just soldier on and kind of pretend like nothing is wrong because we don't want to be seen as crazy. And one thing I really wished I had when I was going through this was just some example of some remotely sane, kind, ethical person who seemed functional, who would own up to the fact that they'd failed at this. This was something they tried to do and they'd failed to do. I think it took me a while to

reconceive of it, not as a failure, but as a fact. And that is to say that it took me a long time to realize I can't change other people and I can't actually control other people. I don't get to control what they do. I can only control myself. The way I think of it now is I don't need my family to change for me to love them, but I need them to change to have them in my life. So I've tried to limit the amount of things that I make myself responsible for to the things that I can actually control. And since I can't control their behavior, I can only control what I do in response to their behavior. I have to accept the estrangement as a fact. But I've tried to recast it from a failure to something. It's a decision I had to make.

I'm sad about it. The loss is real. I think my parents are good people. I think they're doing the best they can. But equally, I feel like the choices that they were making with regards to my brother and his issues with violence and the ways that they were choosing to deny that or blame me for it or expose me to that in even worse ways it wasn't something I could keep in my life and it wasn't something I could control or change

so I had to just accept it as a fact you did try to talk to them about it you did say this to them yeah we had a good as I said about five years negotiation around this thing where I confronted my parents about him and his behavior my mother believed me at first my father said I was lying we stopped talking about it for a while my brother became incredibly menacing because he told him what I'd said you know I mean it got very dramatic where he was threatening me at various times or one point he called me and said he'd hired an assassin to come kill me

and I should watch out. And it got really dramatic. And my parents just continued not to believe in it. And actually what they started doing is telling people that I was possessed and that that's why I was saying these things about my brother. So at that point, you know,

you've reached a bit of a crossroads and I felt like there were two options I could deny everything I'd said and go back and whenever I was home accept the fact that there was going to be some violence and I was just gonna have to put up with that and I just didn't feel like I could I didn't feel like that person anymore there was a person for whom that was normalized and okay and there was a person now who I was for whom that was not normalized and okay it was very difficult to imagine going back to that who I was for whom that was not normalized and okay. It was very difficult to imagine going back to that old way of thinking. So that was option one.

It didn't feel like a real option. Or option two was to say, these relationships have been important to me. I value them. I love my family. And I have to let go of this part of my life. I just have to give myself some distance from it. And that's not to say that I don't have to value it or be sad about it, but there has to be a new life that is made going forward that's different from the old one. And that took a bit of faith, I guess, in a weird way, a new kind of faith to think. I think there was all these years where it was impossible for me to imagine a happy future that didn't have my parents in it during those five nightmarish, horrible years. Impossible for me to imagine a future where I could be happy without my mother or even just like myself. I think I was in this weird situation where I was trying to understand, how can I believe that I'm a good person if my mother doesn't believe that I'm a good person? And I never realized how much I was dependent on my parents' opinion of me to believe in myself until I lost that opinion, their good opinion anyway. And it was hard for me to

believe in a future where my belief in my own goodness came from me and not from them, or where I could have a happy life even though my parents weren't in it. And that was something I had to believe in, even though I didn't really see how it could be possible. I do kind of, in a weird way, just describe it as faith, I think, because I really love that scripture in Hebrews, I think it's Hebrews 11, 1, that says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. And I love that idea of faith as this belief in a world that is not the world that we see. There's a world that we see, and I think people who have difficult family relationships, what tends to happen is you have a certain type of interaction with people,

and it leads you to certain conclusions about what human beings are like. And then you go out into your life, and you actually find those people who are like that and surround yourself with them, and you recreate that old world that you had because you believe that the old world is just what the world's like. And so you're drawn to people who confirm that bias for you. And I think faith is the ultimate antidote for that because what you have to do is believe that different

types of relationships, different types of family, different types of everything are possible. I haven't seen it, but I choose to believe in it. And I think it's probably the best way to bring that world into being. Have your parents been in touch since the book has been published? My parents and I are mostly estranged. I email with my mother very occasionally. And as much as I possibly can, I try not to talk about the book. Okay. Yeah. I think how you expressed faith there is so beautiful. It's faith in human connection. Talking of human connection, what was it like when Barack Obama chose education for his summer reading list?

Yeah, it was pretty crazy. No, I would never have expected that. He called me, actually. What? Yeah, he did. It was super nice of him. He did not have to do that. On your phone?

Yeah. And he said, yeah, no, I got a call saying, can you be home later you know the former president would like to call you and I said I think I can squeeze that in like with all the other former presidents I've got calling yeah no he was really kind really generous of him obviously and the call was completely you know I was already very grateful yeah it was bizarre it was great it was really wonderful really surprising so when he called was it actually him on the phone it wasn't i'm putting you through it was like hi tara no someone called

and said and i kind of freaked out because i've been googling you know what do you call former president i was like on you know emilypost.com or whatever and i actually couldn't find any agreement around it some people said oh like mr president is for the current president so i couldn't figure it out. So in the end, I just didn't call him anything. I did that kind of, hi, because I couldn't figure it out. And what did he say that he liked about the book? We had a kind of long conversation about political divisions and the ways in which certainty can be very divisive

and maybe that people have lost a bit of inquisitiveness and have got a little too much certainty and that they don't listen to people as much as they maybe should and all the ways that was kind of tearing apart our politics and he said a really lovely thing he said what he liked about my book is that he thought we were all just kind of fish swimming around in a bowl we don't even know what we don't know. And we all have these flaws and these problems. And what we don't want to do is kind of be arrogant towards other people who are still learning. And he said that he thought my book captured that really well.

So that made me happy. I like thinking of it in those terms. That is to say, I benefited a lot at Cambridge and at BYU and everywhere else from people being willing to have a dialogue with me, even when I said kind of appalling things. I mean, I arrived at Cambridge with a ton of absolutely hideous homophobic ideas, just like every horrible thing that you can think about what a gay person is. I thought that, and I never met one. I was just, these were ideas I had. They were given to me by my parents. And I've been told them so many times from such a young age that they seemed as obvious to me as the sky is blue. You know, it's just like, and everyone believes this, right? And then I got to Cambridge.

And I remember one of my first experiences, there was a woman I introduced myself to. And I didn't even say anything. I just said I'd gone to BYU. And it was 2008. And it was during the big Prop 8 thing in California, very politically charged topic of gay marriage. And the United States was coming apart in 2008 about gay marriage. And she turned away from me and just said to the woman next to her, you should talk to me because I don't have any time to waste talking to a bigot. And that was in the conversation.

And that was in the conversation. But I also met people at Cambridge who I would say appalling things, who would say to me, you seem like a decent person. Why do you think this crazy thing? And there was one guy in particular, I remember I stayed up arguing with him until two or three o'clock in the morning after a fancy dinner. And we're sitting outside of St. John's College, which I a you know fancy dinner and we're sitting outside of st john's college which i think was his college and we're just arguing about gay marriage and i'm saying these incredibly offensive things you know i'm saying that incredible bugbear of what

gay people are like which is well they're all essentially pedophiles was what i believed i've been told this i believed it and i'm saying these things and he did not i don't know how he became who he is but he did not attack me for saying that. He attacked the hell out of the idea. But he didn't attack me. He sort of was very interested in where I'd heard that. And in asking me where I'd heard that made me articulate where I'd heard it. And, of course, where I'd heard it was my father.

And I knew very well that there were all kinds of ideas that my father had given me that I no longer thought. And it put me on a path of thinking about whether that was something I wanted to keep or something I wanted to let go of. And I have a very awkward email that I wrote him the next morning. Dear Andrew, very nice talking to you last night. Lovely to meet you. Just been thinking about the conversation we had. I've decided that you're right and I was wrong and hope to see you later.

And that, you know, super awkward email, like paradigm shift, thanks. And that was it. And I think in some ways I feel like we've become so puritanical and moralizing about these political questions. And if someone doesn't think the right thing, we don't attack the ideas, we attack the person. And I'm very against it. Maybe it's because I'm just justifying myself for the hideous beliefs I used to have.

But I genuinely don't think there's a racist gene. I don't think there's a bigoted gene. I don't think that there's anything that makes one kind of human sexist and another kind of human not sexist. I tend to think people who have quote-unquote enlightened views, metropolitan views, have those views because they've had exposure, because they've had some kind of education, privilege, whatever they've had. I very much dislike the idea of education becoming another privilege that people have and don't acknowledge and attack people for their ignorance. Not attack their ignorance, but attack the people for their ignorance. Because I can't think of anything more horrid than allowing your education to putrefy into arrogance and not recognizing if this person has a prejudice, it might be because their life has been different than mine. They're not genetically different from me. I'm not superior.

I've just had a different life. And I think that because I've had two lives effectively. I've had the isolated life without a lot of opportunity and exposure. And I've had this grotesquely privileged metropolitan life at Cambridge and Harvard. And I can tell you I was made a different person by those two lives. So it's very hard for me to accept any kind of moralizing that dismisses people for small-minded beliefs, for prejudiced beliefs. I think it's always about the ideas. Always attack the ideas and never the people. Attack the ideas and never the people. Attack the ideas, not the people. I could listen to you all day and then all day tomorrow and all day after that.

And I think the way that you talk is so elegant and precise and intelligent. And it just gives people listening a tiny hint of how you write, which is astonishing. And I beg you all to run out and buy a copy of Educated by Tara Westover. It's amazing. Thank you for writing it. Because it must have been pretty traumatic to write, to revisit all of those things. You know, it kind of wasn't.

I think by the time I wrote the book, I'd come to terms with all the bad things. I think what was hard to write actually were the good things. I think those are the things I hadn't come to terms with. I'd been telling myself my family is wholly awful and that there's no loss there. I think it was a way of not feeling the loss by telling myself that it was awful. And then writing the book, I had to kind of confront all the things I missed, I loved, and had to then kind of admit to myself, this was a loss. It doesn't mean it's the wrong decision. I still think it was the right decision, but it's a loss. And in a way, I think that kind of helped

me stop second guessing it. Because prior to that, I think every time I felt something that I missed, that I loved, I would kind of wonder if I'd made the wrong choice. And it was helpful for me to realize, no, the loss can be real and it can still be the right choice. But thank you for all the lovely things you said. And thank you for having me on the show. Thank you so much for talking to me.