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listen to as well. And we've also brought back some of our most popular and most riveting stories from No Filter, which is what you're going to hear today. If you've been listening to No Filter for a while, you'll know that I'm particularly interested in cults. But sometimes when you say that word, people imagine like a cult leader and a sect, and maybe it is a religious cult, and religion can often play a part. But sometimes these cults
happen within families. Sometimes people are manipulated by their loved ones or people who purport to love them, and Tara Westover's story is exactly that.
Have a listen.
Just a warning, this episode deals with some adult content. So if you have little years around, you might want to save it for later or populary buds in from the Mom and mea podcast network, I'm mea Friedman and this is no filter, real stories. You won't be able to stop listening to. It's every kid's dream not to have to go to school, and Tara Westover lived that dream for the first sixteen years of her life, but it wasn't.
Actually her choice.
Tara was raised by fundamentalist Mormon parents who had some pretty radical beliefs. They were survivalists, actively planning for the end of the world, stop piling guns and food, making their own medicine, and cutting themselves off from every aspect of everyday life, including schools and even doctors who they
believed were evil and corrupt. Tara and her six brothers and sisters grew up on a farm in rural Idaho, where her dad had a junkyard full of scrap metal, and all the children were forced to work there doing wildly dangerous things each day instead of going to school. It's not like they were homeschooled, they just weren't schooled. For her entire childhood, Tara had no friends, had never been to anyone else's house and knew virtually nobody outside
her immediate family. She didn't step foot into a classroom until she was sixteen years old. She'd never heard of Michael Jackson or the Holocaust. Today she's a doctor of history at Cambridge University and how she got from there to here is a cracking story that she's written in a best selling memoir called Educated. She came into Mamma Mia when she was in Australia recently and we sat down to talk.
Here's Tara Westover.
I wanted to take you back to nineteen ninety nine New Year's Eve. Some people listening to this will not be aware of the significance of that date and what everyone thought might befall the world on that day. Where were you and how how did your family spend New Year's Eve in nineteen ninety nine.
You know, my dad was he was a big survivalist. He was always preparing for the end of the world.
And you mean that literally. He was like, oh, the world's going to hell now.
He was like, the world is ending, and he wanted he wanted a ten year supply of food because he thought that part of the kind of second coming in the apocalypse would be this sort of ten years of devastation, and if you were left standing at the end of that ten years, you were one of the chosen. You were prepared, and then you would be one of the righteous. And so that was the idea. So it was always coming.
And Y two K was a theory that a lot of people worried about Y two K, that all the computer systems would when it turned over to the year two thousand and the computers that had been programmed with a two digit year date wouldn't know how to function. Of course, they'd taken care of that, you know, they saw that coming and they fixed it. But my dad was convinced I was gonna be the end, and you know, that's what I read about in the book is y tuk.
But I mean it was kind of every couple of years my dad found a date and thought that the world was gonna end for my whole childhood.
Really but that night scary, Ah, you'd think so.
In a way, No, in a lot of ways, no, because we were so prepared, you know, I mean we had a lot of food, we had everything that we needed, we had water, we had fuel. In a lot of ways, you know, my family lived in this tiny town, and we were we were radical, we were extreme. I'd never had any friends who went to school, you know, mainstream friends. I didn't have any the kids that I saw at church on Sunday, I'd never been to their houses and
they'd never been to mine. So we lived in this very you know, we were that kind of weird family, that weird homeschool family, and this was gonna be reversal of that. You know, when the world ended, we were gonna suddenly be the people who people looked up to because we would have food, we would have everything we needed. So there was a kind of way in which I anticipated it almost with eagerness, I think for most of my life.
Was there also an aspect of sort of excitement and adventure about it?
Yeah? Absolutely. I Mean we had this beautiful mountain that we lived on, and I remember just thinking a lot as a child when the end came, if we had to hide from the Feds or something, Yeah, we'd had on the mountain and we could survive on it forever because we knew it so well and they didn't. And so you know, we knewhere all these caves were, We knew where the streams were we we knew, we knew where the wild onions were. We'd be fine and they wouldn't.
That was a really pleasant thought to me as a child.
That sense of when you just talked about hiding from the Feds. There's throughout your book and throughout your childhood this real sense of an external threat. And sometimes it's sort of bit existential, like the world's going to end, and other times it's actually of sort of the infrastructure of society, like doctors and law enforcement offices and even teachers. How did your dad sort of explain that to you? And was was your mom joined with him in this idea or was it really just him.
I think he would usually start out with just him. He would get an idea about something, and my mother would often have a different idea. The thing about my mother is she's a really complicated person. I've always felt like there's two versions of my mother. There's the version that she is when she's with you, and then there's the version that she is when she's with my father, and they're not the same person. And so I remember I was about nine and we were visiting my grandparents
in Arizona. My father's parents when my dad kind of first started saying these things about doctors and saying that they're part of the Illuminati, and that if you took a pharmaceutical that it would damage your standing.
With God, and what is all the Illuminati for people?
He do? For my dad, he had this idea that all of these institutions had been infiltrated by some kind of nefarious kind of Satanic not Satanic in the sense of ritualistically worshiping Satan, but you know, almost on unaware agents of Satan. You know that they were corrupt, and they were money seeking, and the devil was in their hearts making them do these things. And so they were, you know, they were in the schools trying to trying to lead children away from God, and they were They'd
even infiltrated the church, my dad believed. And so anytime the church would have a doctrine that he didn't think was right, he would think that, you know, the Illuminati had infiltrated the church. And the church had a lot of doctrines my dad didn't like, like vaccinations, and the church is pretty pro doctor and schools even and so there were all these things. But yeah, so he had this deep paranoia of any institution that he didn't himself have control over, and so you know, yeah, he kind
of wanted to keep us away from those things. And I think it's because he really did worry. There was a great fearfulness in him. I think of ideas that weren't his ideas and not an I think for people that sounds almost like I'm trying to say he was controlling, and he was, but he wasn't controlling. I don't think for control's sake. I think he was controlling because he believed the world was dangerous. He thought that we needed to be protected from it.
But when you say he had a fear of any ideas or thoughts that weren't his, that's kind of megalomaniac, it is.
But I think again, if you have the paranoia, I think he really felt like these you know, ideologies were coming from Satan, you know. And so when I say that weren't his ideas, I don't mean that in a megalomania where he had to have the good ideas. I mean it in the way of if he didn't agree with it, you know, like he wasn't annoyed about evolution because he didn't think of it. He was annoyed about
evolution because he was afraid of it. Yeah, like he wasn't like he wasn't against science because it wasn't his idea. That's narcissism, right, he was. He was afraid of science because it didn't comport with the beliefs that he had, and he was afraid that it would threaten faith.
You say early in the book that with hindsight, you think he is bipolar.
That's my suspicion. I'm not a doctor, but I just mise it's the only thing. I It's a way that I make sense of my childhood.
And what leads you to believe that just what.
I've read about kind of mood disorders, bipolar, schizophrenia. I think when I was a child, I didn't I didn't know anything about mental illness. I thought you could either be sane or insane, and the idea that you could be functional and something could still be a bit wrong just didn't occur to me. It wasn't until I was out of university taking you know, it's like one oh one that this was explained to me, And for me it was just a revelation I understanding what paranoia is
and how it comes about for me. Suddenly I was able to make sense of my life in a way that I hadn't I hadn't before, And how he could believe so strongly and so fearfully in things that to me were increasingly just looking really harmless.
So back in nineteen ninety nine it was one of the times that he'd predicted that the world was going to come to an end.
How did that night play out?
Well, I think I guess we just thought that midnight would come and the world would end. And I remember we had this TV, which my whole childhood we hadn't had and recently had my dad allowed a TV. And then because he's the kind of person who is really extreme, you know, you can't have anything, and then when he does get it, he goes all the way. So he went from having no TV or radio or anything. There was even a time we didn't have a phone, and when he did get a TV, he was like cable,
you know, all the way. Yeah. So I remember it was like they were doing a marathon at the Honeymooners. I think that night and Night Love the Honeymooners, and so he was just we were just watching TV and we just thought the world's gonna end, and we waited and it just didn't.
And midnight was their RELIEFE was their disappointment.
I think for me there was a bit of disappointment, but then there was also, you know, just seeing my dad's disappointment, and I remember feeling a little bit sad and not angry with God, because I don't think I was capable of that at that time, but sad and frustrated that why why would God deny him this? Like he'd been so faithful in preparing and it just seemed cruel, which.
Is a funny way to kind of grate the fact that the world didn't it.
It's like buma.
Yeah, that was when you describe the scene in the book, that's the sense you get that. It was just like your dad was really bummed, and you kind of stayed up with him because you felt sorry for him.
I was kind of confused, you know. That was the time in my life I had been I was I was singing. My dad really liked to hear me sing, and he liked I was allowed to do things that my siblings would never been allowed to do. I was allowed to go over to town and be in plays, just because he loved hearing me sing. And so I had been allowed to go over to town and be in this play. And I had, for the first time
in my life. You know, I had a conversation with a kid who went to school, This this boy I knew his name was Charles and he so I had I'd kind of almost in my mind anyway, made a friend who was mainstream and uh, and this is a person that I mean, I remember what I remember about the world as I was worried because we were going
to have all the food. And my dad had always said that when we had all the food, people would try to take the food from us because they'd be starving, which seemed reasonable to me that they would want to do that, and that we know we might need to fight them off. We need to protect our food, which is reasonable. This is a zombie apocalypse, people will probably come try to eat your food or a normal apocalypse,
and an apocalypse people are gonna watch your people. So you know, we had, you know, in true American fashion, we had all of our guns. We were ready for that and uh, and we'd bought some new guns, some big ones, and I remember, I just remember that that all had made sense to me, and I was really comfortable with that as a scenario until I until I had met this one person. And that was the first time that in my imagination of having people come to our house trying to take our food, that there was
a face on that person. And I suddenly it was hard to imagine how that would really play out. And
I was just I was really I just didn't. I still had a huge part of me that wanted the apocalypse to happen, and because we were so prepared and Dad wanted it and we had everything we needed and that sense of adventure and all that childish all those childhood kind of fantasies about it, and then and then I had also this other part of me that was starting to engage with the mainstream in this incredibly small way.
Like I said, I thought we were friends. You know, I'm sure he was, like I talked to that girl one time, but you know, I thought we were friends. And so for me, it was it was complicated, and I didn't I didn't know what I wanted to happen.
You were brought up within what you described as an extreme form of Mormonism. Can you explain what the basic principle of being mormony is and then how extreme your version was.
Yeah, I tend to really deemphasize the Mormon Everyone likes to talk about the Mormonism. I think to me, it's the least relevant factor. I call my dad a survivalist, I call him a radical survivalist. I call him all kinds of things like that, because I think he, you know, he just had radical beliefs, but I don't think that
they were particularly Mormon beliefs. He had been raised mainstream Mormon, but wasn't really I mean, Mormonism was a huge part of my childhood, but not really the typical kind of Mormonism. And everyone in my town was Mormon. But they all went to school, they all went to the doctor, they all had birth certificates, they were they lived in mainstream life. They were just Mormon. Whereas my dad, again, I think
the mental illness just comes into it. And it's long been my view that the whatever was going on with him mentally, you know, whatever mood disorder he had, and that you know, my speculation about that. I think that the mood disorder probably caused the religious extremism and not the other way around. I think the extremism was just a vehicle. My dad was fanatical about everything in his life. You know. It wasn't just religion. I think that was
just one. It was just a It became a vehicle for all the other forms of extremism that he had. He would justify it in religious terms, but there was nothing the church that wasn't coming from the church. It was coming from his brain.
How did it impact upon you as a girl and then I young woman in terms of his views and the rules that he mandated the women and girls in his house follow, well.
I think I grew up in a very gendered household. Mormonism itself is quite gendered, but my dad, by which I mean they have quite strong ideas about gender and about the differences between men and women and the rules that they're supposed to play. My dad definitely took that further. You know. He was obsessed with modesty, and he did
not think women should work outside the home. And he had a hard time when my brother made a decision to go to college, but it was nothing compared to how hard it was for him when I decided to go. So I think there were there were definitely some serious gender implications and really strong ideas about gender in my family.
I think when I was growing up, it just would never have occurred to me that I wouldn't live the same life as every other woman I knew as the life that my dad, you know, it was just assumed I would get married when I was eighteen nineteen, kind of at the outer edge, and I would get a house on the fire somewhere, and I would just have kids, and I would probably have them at home. I've definitely
have them at home, definitely not in a hospital. My mother would deliver them because she'd become a midwife, and not a midwife in the sense that she went and got a medical degree, of course, because we don't believe in doctors. So she just kind of started doing it.
And your dad didn't believe in women working outside the home until she started to earn money.
Well, I don't think he would have. He wouldn't have considered it working outside the home. This is where people have, you know. He wanted he thought that the medical establishment was a part of this conspiracy, so he needed he needed us to be independent of that. And so in order for us to be independent of that, we you know, we owned a junk yard, and it was a really dangerous place. We got injured all the time. There had to be a way for us to get to treat
those injuries somehow. So he wanted he needed my mother to become a midwife so that when we had children and he had grandchildren, that they wouldn't have to go to the hospital because the hospital is evil. And then when we were injured, we needed to have a way to treat that. So I think I don't think he thought of it as her working outside the home, but it did become that because once she became a midwife and once she started, you know, selling herbs, and then
she was pretty much working. She's working inside the home, but she was working.
I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that idea of the gendered household. Did you have to dress a certain way?
Mormonism has kind of basic standards of modesty. You have to cover the shoulders, you should be covered above the knee. It's kind of the normal Mormon standard. My dad is the usual. Uh took it further than that, And so I remember him telling me he never he thought ankles were Yeah, did not necessarily want to be seeing a lot of ankle and there was a big fashion in the nineties. Close capri pants were a big thing in
the nineties, and he wouldn't allow me to wear those. Yeah, he was really against those, and so he had and it was just it was it was just a lot
of I think the idea. I just remember when I was fifteen, sixteen years old, feeling like I didn't understand how it could be done, because it seemed like if I remember hearing him lecture once we came home from church and he was complaining about something a woman had been wearing at church because it had been this really fitting blouse and she leaned forward to pick up a hymn book and he had gotten a view down her shirt and and he was just he just wasn't gonna
let us go, and he was talking about it and how terrible it was she was wearing and modest, and I remember thinking, well, it's really loose. We're not allowed to wear tight clothing because it's tight, it's form fitting, and that's that's that's suggestive, So we can't wear that.
But if it's loose, And I just remember thinking, like, what is the right amount of tightness and looseness, and how do you move and do things and exist in the world, and and never and never have it be revealed that you have a shape and how do you do that? But then you're also supposed to look nice, so if you came out looking frumpy, then that would also be commented upon. And I just remember feeling like there just was not a way to kind of exist
or move through the world modestly. I just didn't know how to do that.
So there were all these rules for you. How many sisters did you?
Just brothers? One sister, so.
There were two girls and five boys in the family and your mom. So in some ways he had different rules and expectations for his daughters and his wife versus his sons. But in other ways, in terms of the work, you were expected to do this in the junkyard where he how would you even describe what he did?
Well, he sold scrap medal, he was on a junk yard, he sold scrap.
You were expected to really muck in there. There was no sense of old tar as a girl, she can't do this. Like the things that he had you do. My jaw was on the floor as I was reading your book, like things that were just so not dangerous for anyone, whether they are a man or a woman or a child, as you and your brothers were.
Extraordinarily dangerous things.
Did that make you sort of feel invincible or did it make you feel scared?
You know, it's funny you say it, and I think, yeah, it's kind of strange that my sister and I were kind of allowed to work in the scrapyard. Thin it's kind of weird, I know what that was. I think some of that is just rural frontierness. I think I think the West, the Mountain West, the frontier of the United States had long ago, I think dispensed with this nonsense that women are physically fragile, you know, not being
as strong as a man does. It's not the same thing as fragility, you know, it's just not You can do a lot of stuff even if you don't have the exact up arm strength as a man. And I don't know, I just I think women in that living in that life and living in that place and living on farms since they got there in the eighteen thirties and forties and fifties have been doing that kind of labor.
And I just don't, no matter how gendered your ideas are, I don't know that that weird idea of like, well, women shouldn't do physically demanding things is you know, thankfully just not been a part of that culture. So I think, you know, for my dad, he had a scrap yard.
He when it was time to scrap, and scrapping is one of those things where you kind of seasons that you do at the price of model goes up and then you sell everything that you have, and so you know, there'd be seasons of it and you need and there's a lot to do, and like any kind of farm work, right, this is harvest time. Everyone works, and that's that's just how it is.
You call the book educated, but in fact, you weren't educated. Like it's not like that you were homeschooled.
You weren't really schooled.
So did you call it educated in terms of the education you laid out for yourself?
I called it educated. Well, I called it it that's something about a second. I called it educated because I wanted to tell a story that would make people ask that question, which is to say, you know, I think a lot of times are ideas about what an education is a very institutional and we think sometimes I think we've confused what an education is with what a school is, and I think an education in a school of very different things. Education is the individuals pursuit of understanding. That's
all it is. It's very simple. Schools the means by which we try to achieve that, and has all the problems of any human institution. So I think, you know, yeah, I didn't receive an education in the sense that I never would an essay, when ever took an exam. I never had any of these formal trappings of an education. And then eventually I did get all those things. Eventually I had this extreme experience of education. I had a lot of ignorance, the extreme absence of education and the
traditional institutional sense. But then later in my life, you know, I got to go to Harvard, I got to go to Cambridge, I got a PhD. I had extreme institutional education. And then I had a period in my life where maybe I wasn't reading a lot of history. I was kept at home. I was reading, you know, the Bible in nineteenth century Mormon sermons because that was what was there, and that was a kind of education, and in a way, and then I had my parents kind of they had
their own interpretation of what an education was. And one of the things they would say to us is you can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach you.
And I believe that's just not true.
I think it can be. I think, and this is the thing I think John Dewey right, it's a great thinker about education. He always said, he used to say education is two. It has two components. There's the individual component, or what an individual brings to their education, and then there's the social component, what society brings. And you really
need both of those things. You have to have the social element because you don't want to be inventing the physics every time every person that comes into the world. You want to start where the last person left off. You don't want to start from the beginning. But equally, you have to have buy in, for lack of a better phrase, there's something that an individual brings in deciding what they want to learn and how they want to learn it, and you cannot have a real education without
those things. You know, my parents were fully devoted to the individual side. They took it too far, but they were really devoted to it. And then I think I talked to some of my friends who had a more traditional education, or I myself have now had some years of traditional education, and I feel like the social is is if my parents were too far the one way.
I think maybe the mainstream is too far the other, because I don't think that I've never talked to anyone who felt like they had any control over their education or what they learned or how they learned it. I don't know that I've ever heard anyone explain to me their education in a way that made me think there was any individual component at all. And it's an odd thing if we think in education is the individual's pursuit
of understanding. Pursuit is an active verb, and there's nothing that we do in schools that seems very active to me. Sometimes when you say education to people, I think the words that come to mind, or exam, worksheet, lecture, these are all incredibly passive things. And so gah, I wouldn't necessarily say, oh, my parents got it right, let's all
do that. But you know, I think that there was something in terms of that that that thing they taught me, you can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you. I really do believe that. But I believe it in the sense that if you want to learn it, you will find the people that you need to teach it to you, and you will be a lot more receptive and you will learn a lot faster than if you are waiting for someone to teach
it to you. Writing is one of those things everyone says you can't you can't teach writing, and they're probably right. I'm not sure you can teach writing. I'm convinced you can learn it, but I'm not sure you can teach it.
You talk about knowing that your father loves you, but when you're a child, he put you and your siblings and your mom in the most incredible danger. Many times you had a couple of horrific car crashes where pretty much all of you were horrifically injured, and then he wouldn't let you go to hospital to have those injuries treated. And then every day when you had to go out and work in the junkyard, you were also at risk of horrible injury, and you and your siblings got injured frequently.
How do you reconcile those two things, because surely as parents, we have two jobs knowing that, you know, making our children feel loved and making them feel safe. What happens when those two things go against each other.
This is a difficult question, I think. I think there's two answers to it, and they're separated by a lot of years. I think as a child, you know, my dad would ask me to do things in the junkyard, and my siblings too that we would just think we're not probably gonna get through this. Like his method of doing this, I mean, because it wasn't.
Can you paint a little bit of a picture for people think that you were just like you know, rummaging through rubbish and picking out little bits of tin.
There was a bit of that, but that was the nice part. Yeah, No, I mean it was full of jagged, heavy scrap, you know. I mean when I was about ten, I filled a bin full of scrap iron. I was about one town, about two thousand pounds. And what has to happened then is the bin needs to be picked up and needs by JCB an extendable boom and it's raised in the air.
I don't know what any of Floyds woulds made.
Just a forklift. I got a forklift with an extendable boom, and it'll pick it up, it'll go drop it into a big semi trailer, you know, really big fifty foot trailer with walls, you know, fifteen twenty feet high. So this scrap had to be dumped, and then what the ideally you climb in after and you kind of settle the scrap so that more will fit in. And my dad he didn't want to run the bin up twice.
He didn't want to pick the bin up and raise it up and dump it and then have to you know, go down and then run me back up again to get into the trailer to settle a scrap. So he had this great idea that what he would do is have me ride the scrap up and then he would just pause the bin by the trailer and I would climb out and kind of run over and climb onto the cab, and then he would dump the bin and I would just climb back in and settle it. This
was his idea. Well, that wasn't such a great idea because what happened when he picked up the bin and whipped it around is a giant spear of some kind of scrap just like went straight into my leg and just pinned me there. And I couldn't move, and then he had raised the he'd raise the bin and I was shouting at him, but it's a loud diesel engine. He couldn't hear me. And then he raised the bin and he dumped it, which if I'd gone forward with all the scrap, it would have just been like going
through a meat grinder. I mean, you wouldn't Yeah, it would be bad. Luckily, the kind of the spike came out of my leg and I was I was able to kind of throw myself over the side of the bin, so I felt I fell really far and I smashed into the side of the trailer wall, and I was definitely hurt, but I was I was okay, I was alive. The way that I experienced that at the time, it was kind of two ways. I think there was the first feeling I had, which was kind of a bit
of shame. When my dad came over and asked me what happened. I just felt like, Yeah, why couldn't I do that? It was a simple thing. I shouldn't be able to do it because I knew. I knew my dad loved me. I knew that, so I thought the failing had to be mine and then the other way that you experience it is wondering, well, maybe he doesn't love me, which is not a great alternative. And those are the two ways. It's the only way that you
can if you fast forward a few years. I think there's information that I needed that I did not have to understand that to just shy what was happening to me and for me. The missing piece of that, I think is the mental disorder, is that bipolar, dischizophrenia, whatever it is, that makes him so completely unable to evaluate risk, to understand that the bad things can happen. And I don't think my dad does understand that he has such
extreme beliefs. He thinks that kind of God is there making sure everything is okay, and that if something happens, it happens for a reason, especially injuries, and he doesn't tend to learn from bad things to happen. And then just the extremity of the way he would respond to the situation. So you mentioned that he wouldn't give us medical care, but it's not that he would give himself medical care. I mean, the worst injury that happened in
my father's junk yard had happened to my father. He did not remove the fuel from a car from a fuel tank before he led a cutting torch and tried to remove the tank, and what happened is the car exploded because fuel is flammable. You know, it's an incredibly predictable event. But he just wasn't able to evaluate that risk. So it's not as though he put us in danger and then kept himself perfectly safe. This was a flaw in the way his mind worked. He wasn't able. And
it's not like he took himself to the hospital. He was burned terribly, but they treated that at home. They had no IV, they had no morphine, and he nearly died and he never recovered. His hands are just kind of almost claw like his right hand, and his face is waxy. He doesn't have fingerprints, and it was terrible burn.
So I guess what I'm saying or trying to say, is I didn't have the information that I have now, which is I just didn't know that it was possible that my father could love me and still be flawed in that way. I didn't know that it was possible that he could value my safety and be so completely unable to keep me safe. And I do know that now, but I didn't know it then.
Your mother is perhaps the most complex character in this book and in your life, in that you don't believe that she's mentally unwell, and you talk about her being a different person when she's with your father as she is with everyone else. She saw what was happening to you and what was happening to your siblings, but she didn't protect you, or she wasn't able to protect you. How are you able to how do you see that now?
I've always felt like my mother was two people that she is. There's the person she is when she's with you, and then there's the person that she is when she's with my dad, And I don't know which is the real her. You know, when my dad first started developing his kind of radical ideas about doctors, that's when we
had this really difficult car accident. You know, we drove all night, which my mother didn't want to do, but she didn't say anything to my dad, and he'd been giving this lectures for weeks about how doctors are part of the illuminati and they were terrible, and she would privately disagree with him. She said to me that she didn't agree, but she never said it to him, and she never said to him, that's fine that you believe that, dear, But should anything happen to me, I want to go
to the hospital. And then we got into this horrible car accident. We drove all night and my brother was seventeen, and he fell asleep at the wheel, and we crashed, you know, bad crash, and her head hit the windshields so hard there was a crack that ran the whole length of it. And she was disoriented, and she had raccoon eyes that are a sign of traumatic brain injury, and she wasn't she was incapacitated, and my dad, because of the beliefs he had, you know, we didn't take
her to the hospital. We didn't take her to get a katska, and we didn't do anything like that. And I don't know. I mean, I don't blame her for that accident, obviously, but for me, the question is always I guess I really do believe that if she had said to my dad, if should something happen to me, this is how I want it handled, I think he would have taken her. But she hadn't said that. I
think he assumed. I mean, I know that he assumed she agreed, and over the years she came into more and more agreement with him, so that now she has his exact same views about doctors. But the beginning she didn't. But she didn't say. And I've always wondered about that car accident. If it had been one of us that was injured really badly and not her, what would she
have done. Would she have insisted that we go to the hospital, or would she have continued to be passive and just let him decide not to not to treat it.
Do you think she was abused by your father?
I don't know. I mean, I guess it depends on I'm very sure that she wasn't physically abused, and I never saw my father berate her in any way, or.
Was she scared of him.
She would never have been afraid of him physically. I can't imagine that she would have been, because he wasn't that kind of person. But I think she was someone who was intimidated by him, and that's a different I guess. I think a lot of people would look at their relationship and say that it was emotionally abusive, And the only reason I'm uncomfortable with that is I think when you say relationship is abusive, I think people have a stereotype in their mind of what that is. And I
don't think it was that. I don't think it was healthy, But I don't think it was that.
I ask because you know, you talk about her beliefs and hospital and stuff. But she watched you, and in fact, she tended to your wounds when you would come back from the junkyard and you would have a hole in your leg and let yet she let you keep going out there with him. And she never said, you know what, no, my kids are going to go to school.
You can get used to anything. And I think I think the thing about a crisis is it's a crisis. And when someone comes in, you know they're missing a finger or something. The last thing you think is I wonder if we should reconsider our general policy on you. Yeah, like, you deal with that thing, and then after it's over, the crisis has passed and everything's okay and they're healing and it's fine, and then you can harry on us before and you do that a few times, and then
pretty soon the injuries are really normalized. Like I never I didn't think about the injuries in the scrapyard. I was writing the book, and I was writing all these things, and it was only when my friends were reading it saying, you cannot be serious. Yeah, these things happened, and I thought, oh, scrap yards are just dangerous. This is just what they're like. And other people I know, and then like other people must have had scrap yards in there in there, you know,
did everyone have all of these injuries? Like, well, you do hear about people getting a car accident, sure, but not as many as we did. Do you hear about people getting burned, but not the way we did? And you hear about but yeah, there was a strange concentration of bad, bad things happening.
Yeah, except it wasn't strange. It was kind of as a consequence of.
You, of decisions that were made.
Yes, it was really bad choices.
Yeah, but you don't, like I said, I think when the crisis happens is the exact moment. You don't have the reflection that would enable you to see those things.
And you also talk about how isolated your upbringing was and your family was. It's not like you went to other people's houses or they came to yours, or there.
Was a lot of perspective on it. For all, everyone's junk yard.
Was like someone else in your family.
Probably the character that shines most brightly or should I say most darkly in this book is your older brother Sean. You have five brothers, but he is the one with whom you have the most intense relationship. And it's the first time I've ever read a really detailed description of an abusive relationship between siblings. He was so physically and emotionally and mentally abusive towards you. Can you describe Sean
a little bit and what your relationship was like? How much older than you was he he's ten years I don't have a lot of memories of him. When I was younger, he wasn't around a lot, and then he ran away from home he was seventeen, and I didn't really know him. My memories of him again when I was about fourteen or fifteen and he moved home, and you know, he was this incredibly kind, sensitive, attentive person. He was aware of me in a way that nobody
in my life had been aware of me. He was protective of me in a way that my life had been protective of me. And like my father, he had a grip on safety and if he was in the scrap yard, a lot of the things that my dad would suggest, these just crazy plans. He would just be. He would just step forward and say we're not doing it that way and uh, and then they would fight. And so he took on this, He took on this role for me as someone who looked after me, and in a lot.
Of ways he really did, you know. I mean, he saved my life. And we were breaking horses once and I got in a really bad situation on a horse. I lost control of the reins and the horse went berserk and my foot was caught in the stirrup. And if you know anything about horse riding, you know that's a pretty bad situation. So you fall off, you fall clean off, You're probably gonna be fine, but if your foot's caught, you'll get dragged and your head will hit
a rock and that's it. You're done. And I thought I was I thought I was a goner because the only person that was around that could help me at all was my brother Shawan, and he was on a horse it's about twenty feet behind me, that had never had a rider on its back ever. This was its first time in fact, it hadn't even had a saddle. We put the saddle on, and we thought, right, we'll just put the saddle on and take it off because but she was tolerating it pretty well, so we thought, right,
we'll just hop on her and see what happens. And then this is when I got in this situation. And so he's sitting on this twelve hundred pounds thorough bread. I'm thinking, yeah, there's no way that he is gonna whip the horse into a frenzy that he would need to to catch the horse I'm on, which is going completely crazy. You know, show me he's gonna risk that, because he'll never be able to calm it down again and then we'll both be dead. But that's exactly what
he did. And so he was capable of tremendous sacrifice self sacrifice. But he also I think had more self loathing than probably any person I've ever met, and that would come out in ways that were yeah, degrading, violent, manipulative, just all kinds of really unhealthy behaviors.
He would do things like force your head into the toilet, twist your arm until it I think it broke. At one stage, I think my wrist had either. I think the bone cracked and it wasn't a cleaner.
Who knows you weren't allowed to go to the doctor.
That's true. Yeah, I think I think the bone probably cracked.
Yeah, I felt aware. Were your parents of what he was doing to you?
That is a good question. I don't know. I know when my sister wrote me and said she wanted to confront my parents for one thing, I had no idea that she had lived my life before I did. That was an unwelcome revelation for me. But then I also felt an incredible reluctance to do what she was asking me to do, which is to confront my parents. And I suppose that I was afraid maybe they wouldn't believe me.
But I think the bigger fear I had wasn't so much that they that they wouldn't believe me, but that I would just discover that they already knew and had already decided that it didn't matter.
There was similar to so many abuses he did. He gasled you in the sense that he kept telling you that it was just a joke, that you were just mucking around, and that worked quite well. Yeah.
I have a theory about that. I think all abuse, no matter what kind of abuse it is, I think it's an assault on the mind. And I think if you're going to abuse someone, you have to re invade the reality and you have to distort it, and you have to simultaneously convince them a couple of things. You have to convince them that what you're doing isn't that bad, which is you have to rationalize it or normalize it. And the other thing you have to convince mother is
that they somehow deserve what's happening. And my brother was really good. I think the second thing happens naturally because people tend to take on blame when they're hurting. I think the first thing was something my brother was just really good at. So, you know, he could he could attack me. And there was one incident that happened where he, yeah, he grabbed me by my hair and hauled me down the hallway and shoved my head in a toilet, and
then we ended up. I was trying to get away and he grabbed me again and I ended up we both ended up falling into the bathtub and I broke my toes he fell in it, and I had a friend that was there I was seventeen and I had, you know, this Charles person. I actually did become friends with this person, and he was there, and you know, after it was all over, I remember my brother Sean, he comes into my room and he just explains to me that it was a game and we were having
a really good time. And you know, next time things are getting out of hand or I'm not having fun, I need to make sure I say something. And I took that perspective on one hundred percent, so much so that I went to Charles and said, oh, it's just a game. And he didn't buy it. He knew what he'd seen. But I think, you know, he didn't really try to reason with me either. I think he could see how deeply under my brother's power I was, you know,
but eventually that would begin to shift. And you know, it was only really a few weeks later that something happened again with my brother. He attacked me in a parking lot and when it.
Was all over, at the time, he laughed, didn't you At.
The time people started, you know, I was screaming and and people started to look and I immediately started to.
Laugh, Why did you do that?
I think it was so much more pleasant to believe it was a game. I definitely wanted other people to believe it was a game. I didn't want other people to know he was attacking me. It was humiliating, and then the and then I think I wanted to believe it myself a little bit. And uh, when it was all over, I wrote this journal entry about it, which is probably the first time in my life that I'd
written other journal entries where I'd been vague. I said I was afraid of my brother had said something had happened, but I wouldn't say what. But this was the first entry that I just wrote what happened, and I wrote. I wrote that I'd been terrified. I wrote that I'd been afraid. I wrote that I would have torn him apart if I could have in that moment, for what he was doing to me.
And when and I.
Was wild I was writing it. He uh, he knocks on my door and he comes into my room and he says to me, Oh, whatever that thing earlier, that was just a game and we were having fun. And you know, next time things get out of hand, or you're or something's hurting you, you really need to speak up and say something.
Oh, was your fault.
And then he left, and I did not know what to think. I didn't I didn't know whose experience was right. For all, I knew it had been a game for him, but I knew what my experience had been, and I knew that I had not been having fun. And so I wrote this slightly strange entry where I wrote both versions. Okay, here's what he says happened, but this is what happened to me. And I think it's probably the first time that that happened, and that my brother had attempted to
dominate me in that way. And at the end of that process, there were still two minds present, two distinct minds, not one mind having gained control over the other.
You took it upon yourself to educate yourself, and you had one brother that had gone to university and encouraged you to go, and you went to BYU. Brigham Young University, which is a Mormon orange college. I can't even imagine the shock you must have had so many firsts living the life that you did, and then moving because you went to live on campus. You were sixteen years old and yet you were at university. What were some of the firsts you encountered and how did you interpret them.
There was a lot of learning about things I didn't know, like the Holocaust, or I thought Europe was a country it wasn't. Uh. And then there's a lot of social awkwardness. I had never had friends my age. I'd never had you had friends. You don't talk a lot about friends.
Even there was a.
Family a mile away that was like my family, and they didn't go to school or believe in doctors. And I mean it's funny, you know, she was my age and I definitely saw her, but friends, not in the traditional sense. You know, she was the oldest of I think ten, and you know she grew up fast and no, so not in the traditional sense. You know, she was kind of a mother. She was kind of Yeah, she was my age where she had ten kids and basically
she was the one raising one. And so no, not really, No, I didn't have friends, not until I went to college. And I was bad at it. Frankly, I just didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to be around people my own age. I had terrible hygiene and I just the whole you know, yeah, I was. I was a weird person. You would would have seen me in a crowd and thought, what is going on there?
Why what do you look like? I did dress in a.
Side I dressed. I wore a lot of my brother's clothes. And when I already tried to dress and what I thought was a female way, it was like way over the top, you know, I just didn't know how to do it. And then probably the bigger issue was just I could not talk to people. I didn't know how.
I remember listening. I remember in classes, you know, I'd have my notebook for notes, and then before the lectures would start, sometimes I would just listen to people kind of greeting each other, and I remember writing out some of these conversations, Hi, Hi, how are you? What have you been doing this weekend? Like I would just write out what people were saying because I was just trying to work out how does this like. I'd never had
to have a conversation like that. I'd talk to my family and that's it.
Uh, yeah, you don't have a lot of small talk with your family, do you.
Know it's not the same or yeah, we would meet other families like I said that, we're like my family, but they were very different conversations and the adults talk, and as kids you just have a very different interaction. And I just never I never that whole small talk conversation here's how you talk to people. I was just
really bad at it. And I remember just just riding them out, and then of course you try to memorize them, and it ends up just going really badly because someone, you know, maybe you know someone at church and they're trying to be nice to you, and so they say, hi, how are you know? They come over and they're like and they're like hi, and then you say fine. You know, you just kind of like you just skip a step because they do something a little bit unexpected and you
can't deal with it. And so I had a lot of conversations like that where they would say hey, nice day, and I'd be like, fine, it's fine. I mean, I'm fine. No, it's a fine it's a fine day. And uh and at that point, you know, they're just sort of like okay, right. So No, I wasn't. It wasn't not a smooth transit.
Plus I thought everyone was, you know, I thought they were all gentiles and not not not good Mormons, because I thought our version of Mormonism was the right one, and theirs was the let's give you a slightly evil one, which didn't help of self isolating a lot of.
The time, did it see you talk about looking around and feeling like everyone was going to go to hell because there were girls that were wearing short skirts.
Or what else shocked you by the outside world?
Oh? Everything, and the movies they watched, the clothes they wore, the fact that they went to the doctor shocked me. And I thought they were going to be punished for that. I thought they were going to be punished for going to school. You know, Yeah, there was there. There was a lot of just me choosing to be isolated. In addition to the fact that even on the rare occasions when I thought I wanted to be friends with someone, I had no idea how to do that.
Did it take a long time to learn how to be a young woman?
I don't know. Does anyone know how to do that? Yeah? What that mean?
If you find out, can you let me know.
I think it takes a long time to learn that the ideas of what people think you should be as a young woman are wholly made up, and that really you're just trying to learn how to be yourself. It's hard enough work. I'd have never thought what you really need to do is learn what other people think you should. There was that wonderful quote the other day I read and I wish I could remember the name of the writer.
She's so great. But it was something like, the problem with gender expectations is that they tell you how you should be and not how you are. And I think that's exactly it. Maybe, yes, we think in general women are more like this, in general men are more like this, But it completely neglects the fact that individuals are not like anything.
What about romantic relationships before marriage?
What do you mean? You have to be more specific?
Did you have sex in college?
Now? Of course not, I was did like?
What was the dismantling of your religious beliefs to the point where you were able to and I don't want to make any assumptions, but to the point where you were able to not feel that every decision you took would mean that you would go to hell?
You know. I mean there's things that you that you internalized because you're told them explicitly, and then there are things that you internalize even though you're not told them explicitly. And I Yeah, the first boyfriend I got I was seventeen, and it was a completely unphysical relationship for a really long time, pretty much the whole duration of it, almost
because I just could not do it. And you know, my older brother, Sean, he'd had this word for me that he'd been calling me since I was fifteen, and the word was whore. And again, I was a teenage girl. That really entered into my self conception in a pretty extreme way, In such an extreme way that when I was sixteen, I wrote this journal entry about my brother and it included the line, It's strange how you give
the people you love so much power over you. But you know, in calling me that for so long, I think he had he had a lot more power over me than I ever could have understood, because what he had done is he had defined me to myself. And I'm really not sure there's a greater power than that. And so I was, you know, seventeen eighteen. That word was so strong and who I thought I was, that any attempt I made to have any kind of physical relationship just filled me with revulsion at my own self.
And so, to be honest, though there were many years where it just was not something I was able to do.
Did you need to be deprogrammed? Like, did you go to a counsel a lot? How did you dismantle this essentially brainwashing, A lifetime of brainwashing until you sort of got to college and started seeing the world through your own lens.
Deprogramming de brainwashing. I don't know if there were words. I didn't feel like that at the time. I think I remember being in college and and I had these wonderful housemates, roommates my second and third year, and I remember really watching them and just becoming aware that there were huge differences between them and me. And I remember the first time I realized I had a real revelation
of what the difference. One of those differences was is one of my housemates, she went on a bad date or something and he ended up calling her a name. I don't really I don't even remember the story, but I remember she came home crying. He said something mean to her. She was so upset about it, and I realized, I just knew if that had happened to me, I wouldn't have any feelings about it. That was a big
difference between her and me. That was the biggest difference she was capable of being hurt by hurtful things and I was not. And you know, I could have been out with someone I've been called a whore or a slut or any other thing, and I would not have even I wouldn't even have felt it. And I thought that was a good thing. Since I was sixteen, I'd been telling myself that was a good thing. It was because I was really strong, because I was I was touchable,
I was invincible. It was a sign of the fact that I could take anything and nothing would affect me. Nothing affected me, nothing could affect me. I said that to myself all the time, and it wasn't until that moment that I realized that it's not affecting me. That was its effect, That was the effect it was having. It was hauling me out. It was making me disconnected from myself. It was making me not able to connect with other people because I couldn't. I couldn't risk it.
So I think it took me a long time to realize that her vulnerability. You know, she was gonna cry that night, but then later she was going to be a full, complete human being and I was not. So did you have therapy to help not then No, I think I went quite far without therapy. I didn't have therapy until I had a mental breakdown because my parents were telling people I was possessed. And then I had a mental breakdown, and at that point I got lots of therapy. And I'm a big fan of therapy now.
But you know, i'd got over before that happened. You know, a lot of the issues i'd had, you know, with physical intimacy or or without vulnerability thing, these were things I'd noodled out myself, and I think I would have probably done it faster with a therapist. It seems like a great waste of time to just sit by yourself and do it. You can be helped with this, you know, But I had you know, I think I had kind of worked that out most of it.
As you progressed further and further to the most extraordinary heights in terms of education, I mean, you certainly overcompensated for a lifetime not setting foot in a classroom or having any formal education.
You started a university, did I think is the word you're looking for?
But yeah, did I say undercompensated, No, No, you just a compensation overcompensated very much overcompensated ridiculously for your lack of formal education. You went from university to Cambridge and then Oxford.
Oxford and went to Cambridge, and I had a year at Harvard, but I got my PhD at Cambridge, So that was a bit I think of an over compensation. Once, once I did make it to a school, I start, that's it, flag planted. I'm never leaving.
I'm going to learn all the things now you're a doctor technically, yeah, in history, yes, all the things that you didn't learn before. And you moved to the UK and you got scholarships and you did extraordinarily well. Because obviously there was no family support for your pursuit of education. They must have been incredibly threatened by you leaving the family and striking out in this particular direction.
No, if I would say they were threatened, I think it made it hard. It was hard on them. They had to negotiate. They had to watch me making decisions they didn't like. They had to watch me getting beliefs they didn't like. They had to a lot of parents have to do that, and my parents did, and they I thought they they handled it fairly well.
Actually I don't know. I started saying you were possessed by the devil.
Yeah, that wasn't about politics, and it wasn't about history, and it wasn't about the fact that I went to school, and it wasn't about any of that. I think what that was about it was about it, but not directly. I think it was only about those things because those things had changed me and I'd become a different person, and because I was different, that was hard for them. Me being a different person was hard for them. I think the negotiation of the actual differences, I think that
they were really doing their best with that. I think we all were trying to just, you know, find you can half kill yourself and not go to the doctor, and I'm gonna pretend like that's all right, and you're going to pretend like it's all right that I'm going to this school in this country that you think is socialist, and we're all just gonna act like it's fine. And we were doing that, and I think, you know, what broke my family apart wasn't was an education in a
direct way. What broke my family apart was me confronting them about my brother's violence and saying it was time to put an end to that and them saying that I was my father, especially saying that I was lying and that I was possessed.
What might you decide to confront them about Chilen.
I got a letter from my sister and saying things had happened with her, and she thought that it was time that we confront them, and I did not want to do that, and I asked her to give me some time to think about it. But I think she had been trying to convince my mother for some time to take it seriously. And I think when she got an email back from me basically saying, you're right, these
things have happened. But let's think I think she. I think she felt this overwhelming need to just show it to my mother and say, look, I'm not I'm not crazy, And so she did.
Sean was married by this time, and at one point you go home and you staying with your parents, and his wife comes over in enormous distress. How did that play out in the end?
You know, it was a strange time. His wife was my age, she might even be a little younger than me, and it was difficult for me not to identify with her. And I was at Cambridge I was studying feminism. I was learning all these great things about gender roles and
all this stuff. And then I went home and witnessed this scene of violence between my brother and his wife, where he had thrown her out of the house in the middle of winter without shoes or a coat, because I think she'd bought the wrong kind of food at the store that day and he'd locked her out of the house and she'd had to, you know, in December in Idaho, which is a really cold place with ice, and yeah, she'd had to run up the hill without shoes, got a coat and yeah, And I did nothing. I
think I just deferred to my dad. I did the exact same thing I'd been trained to do my whole life, which is I I deferred to a source of authority, even kind of knowing that I thought the authority was probably wrong.
She's still with him.
Yeah.
What's your life like now, Tara mine?
Yeah, right now, there's a lot of travel, a lot of promoting the book. But talking about the book, you've stayed in the UK. Yeah, I've stayed in the UK. I've got a dog, I you know, I have a little house. I write. It's very different than the life that I had growing up, obviously, and I'm very different, and I think, you know, it's one of the things
about the book. I think people a lot of people want to read this book, and they want to read it as a sociological kind of study of why some kids embraced education and others don't, or why some kids are resilient and others aren't, or they want it. That's what they want. And for me, I guess I think the questions that the book asks are less sociological and more psychological, because I don't feel qualified to write about any of that other stuff. But for me, are these
psychological questions that are the heart of it. And I think that what it really, what the story asks, at least the way I see it is, is just about change. And it's about all the different versions of a person that can exist in the space of a life. And it's about whether your first self is your only true self, or whether you're allowed to change, and about what happens when the people who are close to you who won't allow you to change, or maybe just can't accept any
other version of you. So that's you know, the fact that my life is so different now. I think that's the narrative. That's what it's about. It's about change, and it's about identity and how much can you change and still feel like yourself? And who gets to decide how much change is too much? And then, of course the argument's over the past, and who gets to control the narratives of the past, because all of these things are bound up together.
What's your relationship black now with your family? And have they read the book? I don't know who else read the book. There's half my family. I'm really close to.
Three of my brothers, and then there is a significant portion of the family from whom I mischranged.
Is that your decision?
It wasn't to begin with, you know. Initially, when my parents said I was lying, they told my brother what I'd said about him, and he disowned me, and they apported that decision. So there was a good year of the of the disownment. That was very much their choice, not mine. I call it phase phase one. Phase one was not my choice, and that lasted about ten months, and then I was offered a way back into the family.
And the way that was offered to me was that my father, very bizarrely just came to Harvard which is not There's two things my dad hates, it's uh travel and liberals. So for him to come to Harvard was
pretty extreme. So he uh he did, though. He came and and he offered me this blessing, which I think would have been tanto out to an exorcism where I could have accepted the blessing and then he would cast out this devil and I could sort of say, well, everything that I'd said about my brother had really been this evil spirit, and I could just deny it all
and I could just have my family. And there was a period of several days where we were walking around, you know, sight seeing in Boston is the weirdest thing, and I was just wrestling with that decision, and there was a period where I thought maybe that was a deal I could make, and I was kind of trying to convince myself that there might be some dignity and what I planned to do, which is to surrender my own ideas about right and wrong, my own perceptions about
what had happened. That I could deny things and say things didn't happen that I knew did, and that somehow that this was a defensible choice to make, that I could do that, you know, to win the love of my parents. And ultimately it was a decision I couldn't make, and I had to kind of come to terms with the fact when my dad did offer it the last night before they left, that the daughter that my dad had come to reclaim just no longer existed anymore. You know.
She had she'd grown up, and she'd read a bunch of books, and she'd developed her own ideas about things and her own perspective on things. And you know, I was no longer in a position where someone could come along and say to me, oh, no, it had been a game. You were having fun, and next time, next time,
make sure you speak out. I knew that that wasn't going to work, and I knew what was happening to me, and I had just become a person who had no tolerance for violence and couldn't really give way to it, and there really wasn't another decision to make. Really as heartbreaking it as it is, I'm so glad for you that you are able to stay with that other person and tell your story.
You should be super proud. It's a wonderful, wonderful book and an extraordinary story. Thank you, Thanks so Much Tara.
You can buy Tara's book at Apple dot co.
Forward Slash Mama Maya Lots and Lots of People Have No Filter is produced by Eliza Ratliffe and if you have any guest suggestions, you can email us at podcast at mamamea dot com dot au. I'm Meya Friedman and I will see you on the homepage. If you're looking for something else to listen to, like and follow all of our Mamamea podcasts which are currently bringing you Hot pod Summer one hundred hours of summer listens, from spicy
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