Educated, by Tara Westover, May 26, 2024

 

Educated by Tara Westover, first edition cover

The book is a memoir, a biography, and since we do not read anything except fiction and poetry at KRG, an exception had to be made to accommodate this account of a young girl surviving a harsh childhood. All her individuality was undermined and she had to do whatever her domineering father and completely submissive mother told her. In the process she was denied even the basic free education that is everyone’s right as a child in America.

How she survived that repressive and culturally impoverished childhood and made it out of a small town to gain a foothold toward education, with texts borrowed from libraries and her brother, is the main thrust of the book. She takes the Aptitude Test (ACT) for college to make it out of Idaho to the Mormon inspired university called Brigham Young University (BYU); this forms an inspiring part of the memoir.

Brigham Youg Unviersity (BYU) campus with Y mountain and Kyhv Peak in the background

Along the way we learn that her father’s main source of income was ‘scrapping’, that is, dismantling junked vehicles, stripping them for parts and selling these in the grey market. Scrapping is a dangerous job, and involves the use of heavy machinery, blowtorches, cranes, and so on. The father employed his children as labour from a young age. Not only did this deprive them of time needed to pursue home schooling, but it also exposed them to the physical dangers of scrapping. We read nasty accounts of her and her sibling Shawn falling from heights and being gashed by projecting sharp edges of machinery, and suffering concussions. Ultimately, the father too suffers third degree burns from an exploding tank of gasoline and barely survives.

Tara's brother Shawn and wife, Emily

The family does not believe in modern medicine or hospitals. The mother makes a career of crushing and bottling herbs to sell them as remedies for all manner of ills. Later, it becomes such a thriving business with hired hands that they can afford a complete renovation and extension of the family home.  But like the Patanjali range of health cures, it all seems to be a scheme based on the gullibility of people for naturopathy.

After graduating from BYU where she is helped by a Mormon bishop to fund her studies, she gets a scholarship to go to Cambridge University in England, where she pursues historical studies. She wrote an essay which was praised by her tutor and she earned a Master’s degree from Trinity College, Cambridge being funded by a Gates Cambridge scholarship. After a brief stint in Harvard as a visiting fellow she returned to Cambridge University and secured her PhD there in 2014.

Tara Westover in Cambridge, England, 2018 Credit: Vogue

In 2018 Penguin Random House published her memoir written mainly while Tara Westover was in England. Many points were contested by her family; this prompted her mother LaRee to write a rejoinder, Educating, in 2020. 

LaRee and Val sit for an interview at home in Clifton, Idaho – she wrote her own memoir called ‘Educating’

The main issue was: did she suffer abuse at the hands of her brother Shawn in the book, as she describes, and did her parents neglect to do anything about it when she reported it to them. This is the most troubling aspect of the memoir: the physical abuse to the point of choking and dunking her face in a toilet bowl that she suffered on several occasions from her brother. The utter domination of her life by her father was a case of bipolar disorder, she alleges, never diagnosed and never treated.

The Tabernacle Choir of the Salt Lake Temple

There is a lot about Mormonism in the book, but what her family practised was a dangerously cultish form of the religion of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and cannot be reconciled with the conservative, but non-extreme, beliefs of present day Mormons.

Full Account and Record of the Reading

Intro to the Novel by Arundathy

Tara Westover photo by Brigitte Lacombe

The author Tara Westover was the youngest of seven children born in Clifton, Idaho (population 259) to Mormon survivalist parents.

Westover family home, Clifton, Idaho in 2020

Mormonism is the theology and religious tradition of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints started by Joseph Smith in Western New York in the 1820s and 1830s.

Mormonism includes significant doctrines such as eternal marriage, baptism for the dead, polygamy, sexual purity, fasting, and Sabbath observance. Mormon theology teaches that humans cannot receive an eternal reward by their own unaided effort. Salvation must come from good deeds, and what we earn is by the grace of the Almighty. The gift of the Holy Ghost is conditional upon continued obedience.

Mormonism is sometimes used to refer to a sect of Christianity, and at other times it is thought of as a cult or a new religion, constituting an American subculture. The Westover family may be described as Mormon in religion and survivalist in preparing for emergencies, and anticipated natural disasters.

The Westover Family Ranch was originally founded north of Rexburg, Idaho in 1890 by Mormon pioneer parents who came West in the 1840s and 1850s.

The junkyard where Tara worked at ‘scrapping’ as a child still exists near the family’s home

Tara had five older brothers and an older sister. Her parents eschewed doctors, hospitals, public schools, and anything that had to do with the Federal government. She was born at home, delivered by a midwife, and was never taken to a doctor or nurse. She was not registered for a birth certificate until she was nine years old. 

Buck's Peak (7,579 ft) in Franklin County, Idaho, where Tara Westover grew up 'scrapping’ on her father's junkyard

As a teenager, Tara yearned to enter the larger world and attend college. She purchased textbooks and studied independently in order to score well on the ACT college aptitude test. She gained admission to Brigham Young University and was awarded a scholarship, although she had no high school diploma. After a difficult first year, in which Westover struggled to adjust, she achieved success and graduated with honours in 2008.

 Tara referred to her family’s vast living room as ‘the Chapel.’ Dozens of Christmas stockings hang from a large wooden rafter

She was then recommended for a Gates Cambridge Scholarship at the University of Cambridge, studying at Trinity College. Later she was a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2010. She returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, where she earned a doctorate in intellectual history in 2014. Her thesis was on “The Family, Morality and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890.”

Westover was selected as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University for Spring 2020, after being a writer in residence during the previous year.

Her memoir Educated was written in London and published in 2018. Its fame spread around the world — eight million copies were sold, and it was translated into 45 languages. Soon there wasn’t a literary circle or book club that wasn’t reading her book.

Tara Westover was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2019, and her book Educated was named one of the Best Books of the year by the Washington Post and a dozen other American magazines. The book itself won numerous awards.

Tara 's family in Idaho first learnt about the book because someone left a copy of it in one of their delivery trucks. By and large, they disagreed with many facts and judgments in Tara’s book. They disputed much of her story that cast the family in a negative light. As a result Tara was estranged from her parents and remains so till this day. Tara does credit her upbringing with giving her a solid work ethic, and a passion for reading — even if what she read for a long time was limited by her parents’ views of what was appropriate.

Tyler Westover and his family

Two of Tara’s siblings obtained doctorates: Tyler is a senior scientist and engineer at the Idaho National Laboratory, and Richard, is an engineer for Intel Corp. in Portland. Both have remained close to their parents, and also to Tara.

An employee sorts inventory for  LaRee Westover’s business of healing potions and oils, called Butterfly Express

Tara’s mother, LaRee, wishing to rebut Tara’s account wrote her own book Educating, aimed at telling her side of things. Tara said, “My version doesn’t have to be the only version, and I’m really comfortable with the idea that there are other ways of looking at my story.”

Essential Oils sold by LaRee Westover's company Butterfly Express – a 10 ml bottle may cost anywhere from $7 to $25

Tara defines education as learning to see other views and images of the world we live in, than what we grew up believing.

Priya

In her memoir, Educated, Tara Westover recounts her difficult life in a dysfunctional family with six siblings, a patriarchal father, and a mother who failed to protect her children from the worst excesses of her husband.

Ruled by the diktats of a tyrannical father and physically abused by a brother, Shawn, her travails as a young girl with six siblings is a compelling read. The Westovers belonged to the Mormon community, a Christian sect called the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. It frowns on formal schooling, avoids medical interventions in hospitals, and suspects the government of policies to snatch liberties from people.

Gene Westover, the father, is an uncompromising Mormon, wedded to his own paranoid theories about the government. He is preparing for the end of the world. He imposes his radical views on his seven children and wife. His dysfunctional behaviour – egotistical in the extreme, stems from what Tara later discovers is a bipolar condition.

Tara, like most of her siblings, was born at home and was denied a birth certificate, and a proper school education; she was not allowed to mingle with peers. She worked on the farm with her father. Her brothers moved out of the toxic environment of their house as they reached adulthood.

Tara questions her parenting and rebels quietly to pursue higher studies. She realises that her insular life in Idaho has not only resulted in lowered confidence but has kept her behind her peers in knowledge and social skills. Tara works hard, gets excellent grades and impresses her teachers in Brigham Young University. She is selected for a course in Cambridge University at Trinity College, and later makes it to Harvard University on a fellowship.

It’s in college that she learns about bipolar disorder and realises that her father suffers from this condition. Her relationship with her parents remains strained as she forges an independent life and she finally finds a tenuous peace.

The passage Priya selected is about Tara looking at her parent’s wedding photograph and assessing her father, who was once a fun loving young man. She finds that in the photograph her parents as newly weds are a picture of joy. She wonders when her seemingly happy father turned into a tyrant with self-centred behaviour and delusional ideas like stockpiling food, banning formal schooling and being suspicious of others.

The childhood recollections of her elder brothers and father, and differ from hers; they remember him as easy-going. The disease, she learns set in around the early twenties in her father.

The Mayo clinic website defines Bipolar disorder, formerly called manic depression, as a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings that include emotional highs (mania or hypomania) and lows (depression).

Kavita

Kavita forgot about the meeting, having gone out to visit some elderly folk in her condo. Then she remembered the KRG meeting and came in toward the end. She apologised and read her passage, though Devika, Arundhaty and others had to leave.

Kavita read the passage from Ch 8 where Tara after some training by a voice teacher sings in church with her mother accompanying her. Her singing is a hit in church and her dad accepts the congratulations of the faithful., who said she sang
like ‘one of God's own angels.’ Later she is even allowed to audition for the heroine in a show of the musical Annie in town, and when dad hears her practising a song, he decides to back her.

Kavita knew a couple who were Mormons. They used to come to Cochin but they were really different; they were against Our Lady, and other Christian churches. They think very differently about Jesus, and closely follow the Book of Mormon.
KumKum said she visited the Salt Lake Temple with Joe and signed the visitors’ register. They followed up for years writing and sending pamphlets to their Calcutta address. Joe said there's a lot of training given to the younger people who have to spend a couple of years of their young life as missionaries.

Thomo talked about the big organ in the Temple. If you go there as a tourist, there are certain times of the day you can actually hear that wonderful instrument being played. It's really overwhelming to hear.

                                                   Salt Lake Temple interior.

Salt Lake City is a wonderful city. Joe has never been in a city with such wide roads, six lanes (132 feet wide) and footpaths on each side wide enough to accommodate another two lanes.

And there are some nice nature parks around there, the  Antelope Island State park where you can see the bisons roam and get close to them.

                                                        Antelope Island Bisons

Devika

Devika chose the passage when the world went from 1999 to the year 2000. It was a huge event as she remembered it. Even today when she looks back, people were talking about it for months before Y2K predicting all kinds of disasters. That's when
we all heard about Y2K. Earlier you thought it was just another year-end but then suddenly you realised there was so much talk going on about it. 

The passage took Devika back to that time. She remembered a friend who had a shipping company and he said the ships would have problems. Didn’t know what the problems were, so they were monitoring on a 24-7 basis, not closing the office at night. So everything kind of took Devika back to that time, a totally crazy time. 

So this is a chapter where dad and the family watched TV all night on Y2K day but the world does not come to an end with the computer calamity. We were not so filled with the portent of calamity in India as this family was in Idaho, but there was a lot of talk about what could happen at that point. Nothing happened and life went on, so all that stockpiling of food and how they made bunkers to survive the predicted calamity was all an unnecessary scare. 

If India is now considered the services hub of the world, a lot of the credit must go to the now-forgotten frenzy called the Y2K bug

Joe said Y2K was a big bonanza for the Indian software companies because all those ancient COBOL programs that the US companies were still running had not taken account of the millennium change of date. Nobody knew how to fix COBOL programs any more in the US, but, of course, we had a lot of COBOLists in India who were all gainfully employed updating those programs. It was quite a good time for the Indian software companies who made a killing. Lakhs of Indian IT professionals got sucked in the whirlwind. It changed the lifestyle of a middle class forever and catapulted India as prime provider of IT services. In 1996-97, India’s software export stood at $1.3 billion; it quadrupled to $5.4 billion in 2000-01. There was no looking back after that. In 2023, the exports touched $320 billion.

At this point Geetha and Thomo lit up the Zoom screen having just driven into Coimbatore from Bengaluru and parked their car. They were dead tired after a long day's effort to get their Nexon EV car charged. They were sleeping over in Coimbatore before driving next morning to Kochi and home.

Arundhathy

Arundhaty read from  Ch 13 where Tara prepares to go to Brigham Young University by taking the admission test ACT (American College Testing), with the encouragement and help of Tyler, her elder brother. This segues into Pamela’s passage from Ch 15 where she actually faces the pressure of taking the ACT.

ACT Prep Guide to English, Mathematics, Reading Comprehension and Science

Arundhaty’s passage describes events soon after Tara is physically abused by Shawn, and has her head pushed into the toilet bowl. She goes through all that torture. Tyler happens to land up when Shawn is abusing her  and catches him in the act. He helps Tara by giving her his own car keys and tells her to go away from home, and not suffer.

“It's time to go, Tara,” Tyler said. “The longer you stay, the less likely you will ever leave.” He advises her to go to Brigham Young University because it takes home-schooled children. So long as she states she is homeschooled they would believe it.

After that, he calls and encourages her to take the ACT test. Tara goes to the web page of BYU

https://www.byu.edu/

and finds attractive pictures of buildings and students. Immediately she is inspired to go to the nearest bookstore and buy an ACT guide.

BYU Football stadium and mountains in the background

Pamela

Pamela chose the passage from Chapter 15 in which Tara is going to take the ACT, a standard multiple choice entrance exam to get into Brigham Young University.

She chose this passage because she herself has gone through such experiences during exams.The feeling of apprehension and fear when facing an exam is described realistically. The mounting fear of the outcome makes Tara place her trust in God and she says, “If it is God's will, then she will go to school.” Tara's lack of confidence in comparison to others was because she was not only unprepared in the subjects, but also unfamiliar with the format of the test. She hadn't seen a bubble sheet before!

Utah State University in Winter where Tara took her ACT test – it is only hours drive from Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks

Saras commended the American system – can you imagine a student in India being able to do this? She doesn't have a home education, but she is able to apply and get into college. Here we need a school leaving certificate. If you don't
have that, you can't do anything. This is so open, by contrast. You try – if you are able to pass the ACT with a minimum score, you are in. Here they won't even allow you to sit for any exam. So in US they do have some concessions for homeschooling. But in her case, that standard was not met. But even then she got this opportunity and she grabbed it with both hands. 

Pamela shared her own experience by saying that she had never scored more than 80% in her life and she felt the same rift between the brilliant ones and the not-so-brilliant ones, just as Tara did. How cool and collected are the ones in the top 15% and how comfortable they feel, but you are not among them. The last sentence of the passage says - "That was their world. I stepped into overalls and returned to mine." Pamela felt that the brilliant ones belong to a world of their own and the others belong to their own.

ACT Bubble Sheet – it befuddled Tara on her first encounter

Pamela belonged to the 80% world and she could identify herself with Tara at this point of her story. The series of challenges that Tara overcame and how she accomplished her goal is admirable. It’s a very impactful story!

KumKum

KumKum chose a passage from Ch 16 that shows Tara’s determination to get herself an education and escape from her brother Shawn’s craziness, her mother's submissiveness, and her father’s oppressive tyranny. She must succeed in her
educational endeavour, she decides, to break free from the confines of a suffocating existence.

Educated by Tara Westover is a memoir that chronicles the author's journey from growing up in a rural Idaho survivalist family with minimal formal education, to eventually pursuing higher education at prestigious universities. In Chapter 16, Tara continues to navigate her academic journey amidst the challenges posed by her upbringing and family dynamics.

KumKum chose to read from this early chapter because it contains all the points of friction that would cause this Mormon family to disintegrate eventually. The domineering father, the bullying brother Shawn, and the mother's submissive nature come across. Tara's individualism and her desire to educate herself amid all her self-doubts are the focus.

Brother Shawn is not only violent, he was even rude to his father. Sixteen-year-old Tara, was outwardly a meek, obedient person, concealing within her the desire to confront her dysfunctional, patriarchal family. She was determined to be properly educated and learn to think for herself. She says: "My first thought was a resolution: I resolved to never again work for my father." Her inner resolve to educate herself remained strong within her, though she could not immediately fulfil it.

Tara applied to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. BYU is a University started by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints. BYU accepted home-schooled children. Tara and two of her brothers, Tyler and Richard, graduated from BYU.

Tara's home schooling was not good enough to prepare her for college. She struggled to keep up with the University's requirements. She was smart and persevered, succeeding in obtaining a Gates Scholarship to Cambridge University in England. This enabled her to complete higher studies there after graduating from BYU.

In this chapter we earn that Tara got admitted to BYU for the semester starting on Jan 5. Her mother hugged her, while her dad tried to be cheerful. He said. "It proves one thing at least, that our homeschool is as good as any public education." Tara knew well this was untrue. She worked hard to remedy her deficiencies and make up for the proper high school education she had missed growing up.

Thomo

Thomo read from Ch 20 where Tara learns about the brutal dehumanised history of African slaves in America and no longercan reconcile to being called a ‘Nigger’ by her brother, Shawn.

Thomo and Geetha were en route from Bengaluru to Kochi and were joining the KRG session from Coimbatore where they had stopped for the night. But since the hotel was noisy they decided to attend theZoom session from the cabin of their lovely Nexon EV car. Saras was surprised to see what looked like the interior of a car when they came on to Zoom.

Tara learns about Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, 1956 and her refusal to relinquish her seat, which led to the bus boycott that sparked the civil rights movement in the United States

Thomo had heard of the Mormons in this book, and knew about Joseph Smith and his forty wives – perhaps the prophet started the polygamous religion to marry all these women! What always impressed the musician in Thomo, about the Mormons was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which he thought was one of the finest choirs in the world. They have 360 members and the pipe organ in their church has 11,623 pipes.

Thomo joined the Zoom session from his car near Coimbatore

Thomo discovered that quite a few celebrated people are Mormons. Mitt Romney, the US Senator, was a Mormon or born to a Mormon family, but what Thomo was not aware was that Kyrsten Sinema, who is a Senator from Arizona, is also a

Mormon.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona was brought up as a Mormon, but professes no religious allegiance now

Ryan Gosling, the actor, is a Mormon too. Paul Walker, you remember, the Fast and Furious actor, who died in a crash was a Mormon. The former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, is a Mormon. So too the singer, Christina Aguilera.

The late Sen Orrin Hatch of Utah, was a Mormon, as are all senators who get elected from that state. Utah is a Mormon stronghold.

The Mormons accept the Bible, but it doesn't rest with that. They believe in other prophetic revelations, and it's a sort of revival Christianity. They have a book called the Book of Mormon. Then there's the Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Wisdom. So it's been a ‘freaky’ religion for a long time.

Thomo remembered one of the Sherlock Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet, which featured Mormons. The murderer in that novel by Conan Doyle is Jefferson Hope, who was engaged to be married to Lucy Ferrier. Hope spends twenty years chasing

down Enoch J. Drebber and Joseph Stangerson, former Mormons. As a member of this sect, Lucy was forced to marry Enoch Drebber after her adopted father was murdered.

Saras

Saras read a passage from Ch 22 where for the first time Tara acknowledges that Shawn was indeed physically abusive and that their way of life was abnormal. This was a very pivotal moment for her when she accepts that she has been abused and that she needs to fight back. Until then whenever Shawn would push her head into the toilet bowl, or twist her hand, all that she could manage was to expunge the violence from her memory. She writes in her diary: “It was a misunderstanding, I
wrote. If I'd asked him to stop, he would have.” 

Tara’s brother Shawn and wife Emily

She says that she was more upset that Tyler had seen her being abused by Shawn, than by the abuse itself. This passage marks the beginning of her fight back, when she actually stands up for herself. The other pivotal moment is when she appears for the exam, and qualifies in the ACT test to escape from her oppressive life within her family. She closes by saying: “My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

We see the glimmer of her education beginning.

Geetha

In the passage from Ch 23 that Geetha read Tara gets a scholarship from Brigham Young University, courtesy of a Mormon bishop. This is the bishop she goes to meet for counselling when she joins. When she gets the scholarship she finds it’s more than she needs and she naively tries to return the excess. 

When she meets the bishop we see her actually growing more independent and taking decisions for herself, spending the little money she gets from her scholarship. When she applied for the grant she had to put together the paperwork needed, one part of which is the economic need criterion, which is assessed by her parents’ income and for that she needed her parents’ tax returns. Knowing her father would never help her, she decides to drive home to Idaho in the middle of the night to steal the forms from the office.

Tara had no formal education in her childhood, but went on to get a PhD from Cambridge

We see Tara actually growing into the person she became in the end. Her independence is like being ‘born again’, so to speak. Even as Geetha was commenting on her passage she was giving driving directions to Thomo, for he had started driving his Nexon EV again immediately after reading his passage. This
showed the tremendous commitment they both have to KRG. There were cheers for them all round. Geetha said they would listen to the rest of the Zoom session on mute while driving.

Joe remarked that this participation from their car might be termed ‘mobile squared’ participation, as it was from a mobile phone while cruising on a mobile platform.

Shobha

Tara remembers her first foray into education and the inner conflict.The whole experience was like having one foot in each world. At college she had friends who did things normally and then she would go home and try to be the person she had been when she lived there. It was doubtful that this new person she was becoming could still belong in that house. Her parents did not agree with her decisions and she began to feel that they were not right. There was confusion in Tara s mind too, a clash between her upbringing and her new experiences.

Shoba thought of this book as a fairy tale about education where all odds were stacked were against her, like Cinderella going to the ball, but she makes it to Cambridge and Harvard. How is it that students with far more advantages, of being sent to good schools and having private tutoring and entrance coaching, don't achieve what she did? So that's also something we need to think about.

It was her drive. Saras said; the openness of the education system in America also helps because she was able to rectify her lack of a proper high-school certification. Whether a child in India in the same situation could emerge successful is moot.

Yes, said Arundhaty, even in the US you don't find everybody taking advantage and overcoming an impoverished childhood exposure. Tara was intelligent. Even her mother who became a herbalist, had to learn about so many things in order to become a successful entrepreneur. Tara’s basic intelligence definitely was there for her.

In the passage from Ch 28 that Shoba chose to read Tara goes to Cambridge where she has to write an essay. She chooses historiography as the subject, which is the study of historians and how they write history without being biased, putting aside
their personal loyalties and keeping a neutral disposition to write history. She studied how the writing of history is done. So for her also, when she writes this book, it is her personal history. Her specialty also informs the book she wrote.

Tara says, freedom from internal constraints is to take control of one's mind, to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from prejudice, addiction, superstition, and to be free from control by others, and forms of self-coercion. It is to be
emancipated from mental slavery.

To write this book, Educated, she had to bring herself out of all these kinds of controls that she had faced all her life. Then she had to examine everything from another point of view and write it down like a liberated person. Her choice of that essay also had something to do with her personal history, felt Shoba.

People appreciated Shoba’s passage. Clearly, Tara worked really hard. In the book it says that she appeared for the ACT twice, but in an interview she said she appeared for it four times. To do all of that on her own without any help, she would have studied with intense focus. She said she didn't sleep for a whole month before taking the ACT – she was studying the whole time. 

At Cambridge she chooses historiography as the topic of her essay. It is the study of historians and how they deal with bias when writing history. It must have resonated with her as she tried to piece together her personal history. In an interview when asked how she came through the trauma unbroken by it, she named three things: counselling at the university, her habit of keeping a journal and Faith, the conviction of things not seen yet.

Jonathan Steinberg (1934 – 2021) Professor of history at Cambridge University was born in New York – he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in Jan 2000 and was afflicted by Alzheimer’s in the last years of his life.

Professor Steinberg was her mentor at Cambridge while writing her essay. She says she had to read books differently without giving herself over to either fear or adoration. She describes how rigorous the professor was in critiquing her writing. No comma, no period, no adjective or adverb was beneath his interest. The professor praised her essay as one of the best he had ever read. Professor Steinberg must also have been thrilled to have a student like her, said Arundhaty.

What's also amazing is that there are teachers like that, who realise that somebody has potential. Not all teachers will be able to bring out that potential. Tara was lucky in that respect also, in having a professor like Steinberg.

Joe said there's an advantage in the method that is used in Oxford and Cambridge, where they have what are called tutors. A tutor is assigned to you and you are expected to go weekly and meet, and there'll be a subject of conversation or an
assignment or something, and you discuss one-on-one.

That's the sort of attention that a student fails to get in most universities, according to Joe. There are other sessions, tutorials, where a group of students, maybe nine or ten, will meet together with a professor or reader and they jointly discuss some topic at length. It's a participative and intimate kind of environment where nobody’s left behind, because the teacher or the professor will oblige you to participate. You cannot be a silent spectator in the background, they won't just let you be. They'll probe and ask you questions. They'll ask you to comment on this, that, or the other, and so on. So that's the advantage of this method, which is particularly helpful for a case like hers where she was disadvantaged in her earlier education. She fully exploited all the opportunities that were given to her when facing an individual professor who would correct, not just the subject matter, but also would look at the essay in depth and do a clear reading of it, and help her to
express herself better, too. That would then be of benefit to her entire working career, as we see from this book.

Priya shared an incident about her teacher. She was in the 10th standard. Her father was transferred from Chennai to Assam, and they were to move. Her teacher told her parents, “We are training her to be a state ranker. So don't take her away. She
can stay in my house, but she'll have to eat vegetarian food.”

But of course, it didn't happen, and Priya missed the chance of becoming a state ranker!

Joe

The passage from Ch 36 which Joe chose marks the point at which Tara Westover frees herself finally from the slavery of her mind and the destructive submission of her life goals to the will of her father, the boss man who had always commanded the full obedience and respect of his children. After she graduates from Harvard, he visits her with his wife and wants to anoint his daughter with holy oil and bring her back to the distorted version of the Mormon faith that he legislated for his children at home. In that moment Tara realises as she says: “If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind.”

In similar fashion Galilei was brought before the Inquisitor in 1633 for advocating that the Earth moved around the Sun and not vice versa; he was forced to recant, but under his breath he said the famous words: Eppur si muove (And still it moves).

Tyrants get their way because people around them fall in line and give their assent, some willingly, but most reluctantly, to keep the peace and live life undisturbed. But sooner or later tyrants will dispossess a person of the liberty they were born with and deprive them of the rights they possess as a human being. Ultimately, the barrier to tyrannical people is the individual’s willingness to stand up and resist their ability to ride roughshod over a person’s rights, binding them to chains of implicit obedience – or else jail.

The Palmyra New York Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seen from the Sacred Grove where Joseph Smith is said to have had a vision – Tara took her parents there when they came to visit her at Harvard

This story also illustrates the sham that home-schooling can become, if it is unsupervised and the child is not tested periodically to make sure the home-schooling is up to par and is actually achieving the scholastic goals of a standard curriculum. Without a common minimum standard laid down and validated by tests, the child will be hostage to the whims of irregular and incomplete teaching.

There can be good reasons for home- schooling, for instance the prevalence of drugs in schools, etc.

Readings

Priya Ch 3  – Early on Tara’s father showed abnormal behaviour symptomatic of bipolar disorder

I'VE ONLY SEEN A single photograph from the wedding. It's of my parents posing in front of a gossamer curtain of pale ivory. Mother is wearing a traditional dress of beaded silk and venetian lace, with a neckline that sits above her collarbone. An embroidered veil covers her head. My father wears a cream suit with wide black lapels. They are both intoxicated with happiness, Mother with a relaxed smile, Dad with a grin so large it pokes out from under the corners of his mustache.

It is difficult for me to believe that the untroubled young man in that photograph is my father. Fearful and anxious, he comes into focus for me as a weary middle-aged man stockpiling food and ammunition.

I don't know when the man in that photograph became the man I know as my father. Perhaps there was no single moment. Dad married when he was twenty-one, had his first son, my brother Tony, at twenty-two. When he was twenty-four, Dad asked Mother if they could hire an herbalist to midwife my brother Shawn. She agreed.

Was that the first hint, or was it just Gene being Gene, eccentric and unconventional, trying to shock his disapproving in-laws? After all, when Tyler was born twenty months later, the birth took place in a hospital. When Dad was twenty-seven, Luke was born, at home, delivered by a midwife. Dad decided not to file for a birth certificate, a decision he repeated with Audrey, Richard and me. A few years later, around the time he turned thirty, Dad pulled my brothers out of school. I don't remember it, because it was before I was born, but I wonder if perhaps that was a turning point. In the four years that followed, Dad got rid of the telephone and chose not to renew his license to drive. He stopped registering and insuring the family car.

Then he began to hoard food.

This last part sounds like my father, but it is not the father my older brothers remember. Dad had just turned forty when the Feds laid siege to the Weavers, an event that confirmed his worst fears.

After that he was at war, even if the war was only in his head.

Perhaps that is why Tony looks at that photo and sees his father, and I see a stranger.

Fourteen years after the incident with the Weavers, I would sit in a university classroom and listen to a professor of psychology describe something called bipolar disorder. Until that moment I had never heard of mental illness. I knew people could go crazy-they'd wear dead cats on their heads or fall in love with a turnip—but the notion that a person could be functional, lucid, persuasive, and something could still be wrong, had never occurred to me.

The professor recited facts in a dull, earthy voice: the average age of onset is twenty-five; there may be no symptoms before then.

The irony was that if Dad was bipolar-or had any of a dozen disorders that might explain his behavior – the same paranoia that was a symptom of the illness would prevent its ever being diagnosed and treated. No one would ever know. (534 words)

Kavita – Ch 8 Tara after some training by a voice teacher sings in church with Mother accompanying. She is a hit and Dad accepts the congratulations of the faithful, and she is even allowed to audition for a show of Annie.

The song finished and I returned to our pew. A prayer was offered to close the service, then the crowd rushed me. Women in floral prints smiled and clasped my hand, men in square black suits clapped my shoulder. The choir director invited me to join the choir, Brother Davis asked me to sing for the Rotary Club, and the bishop— the Mormon equivalent of a pastor – said he'd like me to sing my song at a funeral. I said yes to all of them.

Dad smiled at everyone. There was scarcely a person in the church that Dad hadn't called a gentile – for visiting a doctor or for sending their kids to the public school – but that day he seemed to forget about California socialism and the Illuminati. He stood next to me, a hand on my shoulder, graciously collecting compliments. "We're very blessed," he kept saying. "Very blessed." Papa Jay crossed the chapel and paused in front of our pew. He said I sang like one of God's own angels. Dad looked at him for a moment, then his eyes began to shine and he shook Papa Jay's hand like they were old friends.

I'd never seen this side of my father, but I would see it many times after – every time I sang. However long he'd worked in the junkyard, he was never too tired to drive across the valley to hear me. However bitter his feelings toward socialists like Papa Jay, they were never so bitter that, should those people praise my voice, Dad wouldn't put aside the great battle he was fighting against the Illuminati long enough to say, "Yes, God has blessed us, we're very blessed." It was as if, when I sang, Dad forgot for a moment that the world was a frightening place, that it would corrupt me, that I should be kept safe, sheltered, at home. He wanted my voice to be heard.

The theater in town was putting on a play, Annie, and my teacher said that if the director heard me sing, he would give me the lead.

Mother warned me not to get my hopes up. She said we couldn't afford to drive the twelve miles to town four nights a week for rehearsals, and that even if we could, Dad would never allow me to spend time in town, alone, with who knows what kind of people.

I practiced the songs anyway because I liked them. One evening, I was in my room singing, "The sun'll come out tomorrow," when Dad came in for supper. He chewed his meatloaf quietly, and listened.

"I'll find the money," he told Mother when they went to bed that night. "You get her to that audition." (451 words)

Devika Ch 9 Dad watches TV all night on Y2K but the world does not come to an end with the computer calamity

CHRISTMAS WAS SPARSE THAT YEAR. We weren't poor – Mother's business was doing well and Dad was still scrapping – but we'd spent everything on supplies.

Before Christmas, we continued our preparations as if every action, every minor addition to our stores might make the difference between surviving, and not; after Christmas, we waited. "When the hour of need arises," Dad said, "the time of preparation has passed." The days dragged on, and then it was December 31. Dad was calm at breakfast but under his tranquillity I sensed excitement, and something like longing. He'd been waiting for so many years, burying guns and stockpiling food and warning others to do the same.

Everyone at church had read the prophecies; they knew the Days of Abomination were coming. But still they'd teased Dad, they'd laughed at him. Tonight he would be vindicated.

After dinner, Dad studied Isaiah for hours. At around ten he closed his Bible and turned on the TV. The television was new. Aunt Angie's husband worked for a satellite-TV company, and he'd offered Dad a deal on a subscription. No one had believed it when Dad said yes, but in retrospect it was entirely characteristic for my father to move, in the space of a day, from no TV or radio to full-blown cable. I sometimes wondered if Dad allowed the television that year, specifically, because he knew it would all disappear on January 1.

Perhaps he did it to give us a little taste of the world, before it was swept away.

Dad's favorite program was The Honeymooners, and that night there was a special, with episodes playing back to back. We watched, waiting for The End. I checked the clock every few minutes from ten until eleven, then every few seconds until midnight. Even Dad, who was rarely stirred by anything outside himself, glanced often at the clock.

11:59.

I held my breath. One more minute, I thought, before everything is gone.

Then it was 12:00. The TV was still buzzing, its lights dancing across the carpet. I wondered if our clock was fast. I went to the kitchen and turned on the tap. We had water. Dad stayed still, his eyes on the screen. I returned to the couch.

12:05.

How long would it take for the electricity to fail? Was there a reserve somewhere that was keeping it going these few extra minutes?

The black-and-white specters of Ralph and Alice Kramden argued over a meatloaf.

12:10.

I waited for the screen to flicker and die. I was trying to take it all in, this last, luxurious moment-of sharp yellow light, of warm air flowing from the heater. I was experiencing nostalgia for the life I'd had before, which I would lose at any second, when the world turned and began to devour itself.

The longer I sat motionless, breathing deeply, trying to inhale the last scent of the fallen world, the more I resented its continuing solidity. Nostalgia turned to fatigue.

Sometime after 1:30 I went to bed. I glimpsed Dad as I left, his face frozen in the dark, the light from the TV leaping across his square glasses. He sat as if posed, with no agitation, no embarrassment, as if there were a perfectly mundane explanation for why he was sitting up, alone, at near two in the morning, watching Ralph and Alice Kramden prepare for a Christmas party.

He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark.

But God withheld the flood. (620 words)

Arundhaty – Ch 13 With encouragement and help from Tyler, the elder brother, Tara prepares to go to Brigham Young University by taking the admission test ACT (American College Testing)

WHEN I AWOKE THE next morning, my neck was bruised and my wrist swollen. I had a headache-not an ache in my brain but an actual aching of my brain, as if the organ itself was tender. I went to work but came home early and lay in a dark corner of the basement, waiting it out. I was lying on the carpet, feeling the pounding in my brain, when Tyler found me and folded himself onto the sofa near my head. I was not pleased to see him. The only thing worse than being dragged through the house by my hair was Tyler's having seen it.

Given the choice between letting it play out, and having Tyler there to stop it, I'd have chosen to let it play out. Obviously I would have chosen that. I'd been close to passing out anyway, and then I could have forgotten about it. In a day or two it wouldn't even have been real. It would become a bad dream, and in a month, a mere echo of a bad dream. But Tyler had seen it, had made it real.

"Have you thought about leaving?" Tyler asked.

"And go where?"

"School," he said.

I brightened. "I'm going to enroll in high school in September," I said. "Dad won't like it, but I'm gonna go." I thought Tyler would be pleased; instead, he grimaced.

"You've said that before."

"I'm going to."

"Maybe," Tyler said. "But as long as you live under Dad's roof, it's hard to go when he asks you not to, easy to delay just one more year, until there aren't any years left. If you start as a sophomore, can you even graduate?"

We both knew I couldn't.

"It's time to go, Tara," Tyler said. "The longer you stay, the less likely you will ever leave."

"You think I need to leave?"

Tyler didn't blink, didn't hesitate. "I think this is the worst possible place for you." He'd spoken softly, but it felt as though he'd shouted the words.

"Where could I go?"

"Go where I went," Tyler said. "Go to college."

I snorted.

"BYU takes homeschoolers," he said.

"Is that what we are?" I said. "Homeschoolers?" I tried to remember the last time I'd read a textbook.

"The admissions board won't know anything except what we tell them," Tyler said. "If we say you were homeschooled, they'll believe it."

"I won't get in."

"You will," he said. "Just pass the ACT. One lousy test."

Tyler stood to go. "There's a world out there, Tara," he said. "And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear."

…

Ch 14

Tyler said. "Buy books and learn it."

I said nothing. College was irrelevant to me. I knew how my life would play out: when I was eighteen or nineteen, I would get married. Dad would give me a corner of the farm, and my husband would put a house on it. Mother would teach me about herbs, and also about midwifery, which she'd gone back to now the migraines were less frequent. When I had children, Mother would deliver them, and one day, I supposed, I would be the Midwife. I didn't see where college fit in.

…

Tyler said. "Did you know you can get a degree in music? … Tyler had said something about BYU's webpage. It only took a few minutes to find it. Then the screen was full of pictures-of neat brick buildings the color of sunstone surrounded by emerald trees, of beautiful people walking and laughing, with books tucked under their arms and backpacks slung over their shoulders. It looked like something from a movie. A happy movie.

The next day, I drove forty miles to the nearest bookstore and bought a glossy ACT study guide. (641 words)

Pamela – Ch 15 Tara learns to take the ACT (American College Testing) multiple choice entrance exam to get into Brigham Young University

I woke up every morning at six to study-because it was easier to focus in the mornings, before I was worn out from scrapping.

Although I was still fearful of God's wrath, I reasoned with myself that my passing the ACT was so unlikely, it would take an act of God.

And if God acted, then surely my going to school was His will.

The ACT was composed of four sections: math, English, science and reading. My math skills were improving but they were not strong. While I could answer most of the questions on the practice exam, I was slow, needing double or triple the allotted time. I lacked even a basic knowledge of grammar, though I was learning, beginning with nouns and moving on to prepositions and gerunds.

Science was a mystery, perhaps because the only science book I'd ever read had had detachable pages for coloring. Of the four sections, reading was the only one about which I felt confident.

BYU was a competitive school. I'd need a high score-a twenty-seven at least, which meant the top fifteen percent of my cohort. I was sixteen, had never taken an exam, and had only recently undertaken anything like a systematic education; still I registered for the test. It felt like throwing dice, like the roll was out of my hands.

God would score the toss.

I didn't sleep the night before. My brain conjured so many scenes of disaster, it burned as if with a fever. At five I got out of bed, ate breakfast, and drove the forty miles to Utah State University. I was led into a white classroom with thirty other students, who took their seats and placed their pencils on their desks. A middle-aged woman handed out tests and strange pink sheets I'd never seen before.

"Excuse me," I said when she gave me mine. "What is this?"

"It's a bubble sheet. To mark your answers."

"How does it work?" I said.

"It's the same as any other bubble sheet." She began to move away from me, visibly irritated, as if I were playing a prank.

"I've never used one before."

She appraised me for a moment. "Fill in the bubble of the correct answer," she said. "Blacken it completely. Understand?"

The test began. I'd never sat at a desk for four hours in a room full of people. The noise was unbelievable, yet I seemed to be the only person who heard it, who couldn't divert her attention from the rustle of turning pages and the scratch of pencils on paper.

When it was over I suspected that I'd failed the math, and I was positive that I'd failed the science. My answers for the science portion couldn't even be called guesses. They were random, just patterns of dots on that strange pink sheet.

I drove home. I felt stupid, but more than stupid I felt ridiculous.

Now that I'd seen the other students-watched them march into the classroom in neat rows, claim their seats and calmly fill in their answers, as if they were performing a practiced routine – it seemed absurd that I had thought I could score in the top fifteen percent.

That was their world. I stepped into overalls and returned to mine. (542 words)

KumKum Ch 16 Tara is admitted to Brigham Young University

My first thought was a resolution: I resolved to never again work for my father. I drove to the only grocery store in town, called Stokes, and applied for a job bagging groceries. I was only sixteen, but I didn't tell the manager that and he hired me for forty hours a week. My first shift started at four o'clock the next morning.

When I got home, Dad was driving the loader through the junkyard. I stepped onto the ladder and grabbed hold of the rail.

Over the roar of the engine, I told him I'd found a job but that I would drive the crane in the afternoons, until he could hire someone.

He dropped the boom and stared ahead.

"You've already decided," he said without glancing at me. "No point dragging it out."

I applied to BYU a week later. I had no idea how to write the application, so Tyler wrote it for me. He said I'd been educated according to a rigorous program designed by my mother, who'd made sure I met all the requirements to graduate.

My feelings about the application changed from day to day, almost from minute to minute. Sometimes I was sure God wanted me to go to college, because He'd given me that twenty-eight. Other times I was sure I'd be rejected, and that God would punish me for applying for trying to abandon my own family. But whatever the outcome, I knew I would leave. I would go somewhere, even if it wasn't to school. Home had changed the moment I'd taken Shawn to that hospital instead of to Mother. I had rejected some part of it; now it was rejecting me.

The admissions committee was efficient; I didn't wait long. The letter arrived in a normal envelope. My heart sank when I saw it.

Rejection letters are small, I thought. I open-end it and read “Congratulations.” I had been admitted for the semester beginning January 5.

Mother hugged me. Dad tried to be cheerful. "It proves one thing at least," he said. "Our home school is as good as any public education."

THREE DAYS BEFORE I turned seventeen, Mother drove me to Utah to find an apartment. The search took all day, and we arrived home late to find Dad eating a frozen supper. He hadn't cooked it well and it was mush. The mood around him was charged, combustible. It felt like he might detonate at any moment. Mother didn't even kick off her shoes, just rushed to the kitchen and began shuffling pans to fix a real dinner. Dad moved to the living room and started cursing at the VCR. I could see from the hallway that the cables weren't connected.

When I pointed this out, he exploded. He cussed and waved his arms, shouting that in a man's house the cables should always be hooked up, that a man should never have to come into a room and find the cables to his VCR unhooked. Why the hell had I unhooked them anyway?

Mother rushed in from the kitchen. "I disconnected the cables," she said.

Dad rounded on her, sputtering. "Why do you always take her side!

A man should be able to expect support from his wife!"

I fumbled with the cables while Dad stood over me, shouting. I kept dropping them. My mind pulsed with panic, which overpowered every thought, so that I could not even remember how to connect red to red, white to white.

Then it was gone. 

(586 words)

Thomo Ch20 – Tara learns about the brutal dehumanised history of Africans in America and no longer can reconcile to being called a ‘Nigger’ by her brother, Shawn 

A date appeared on the screen: 1963. I figured there'd been a mistake. I recalled that the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued in 1863. I couldn't account for that hundred years, so I assumed it was a typo. I copied the date into my notes with a question mark, but as more photographs flashed across the screen, it became clear which century the professor meant. The photos were black and white but their subjects were modern-vibrant, well defined. They were not dry stills from another era; they captured movement. Marches. Police.

Firefighters turning hoses on young men.

Dr. Kimball recited names I'd never heard. He began with Rosa Parks. An image appeared of a policeman pressing a woman's finger into an ink sponge. Dr. Kimball said she'd taken a seat on a bus. I understood him as saying she had stolen the seat, although it seemed an odd thing to steal.

Her image was replaced by another, of a black boy in a white shirt, tie and round-brimmed hat. I didn't hear his story. I was still wondering at Rosa Parks, and how someone could steal a bus seat.

Then the image was of a corpse and I heard Dr. Kimball say, "They pulled his body from the river."

There was a date beneath the image: 1955. I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew.

The calculation was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts-the fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother's face.

The next name was Martin Luther King Jr. I had never seen his face before, or heard his name, and it was several minutes before I understood that Dr. Kimball didn't mean Martin Luther, who I had heard of. It took several more minutes for me to connect the name with the image on the screen-of a dark-skinned man standing in front of a white marble temple and surrounded by a vast crowd. I had only just understood who he was and why he was speaking when I was told he had been murdered. I was still ignorant enough to be surprised.

"OUR NIGGER'S BACK!"

I don't know what Shawn saw on my face-whether it was shock, anger or a vacant expression. Whatever it was, he was delighted by it.

He'd found a vulnerability, a tender spot. It was too late to feign indifference.

"Don't call me that," I said. "You don't know what it means."

"Sure I do," he said. "You've got black all over your face, like a nigger!"

Saras Ch 22 – For the fhe first time Tara acknowledges Shawn was physically abusive and that their way of life is abnormal.

I begin to reason with myself, to doubt whether I had spoken clearly: what had I whispered and what had I screamed? I decide that if I had asked differently, been more calm, he would have stopped. I write this until I believe it, which doesn't take long because I want to believe it. It's comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power.

I put away my journal and lie in bed, reciting this narrative as if it is a poem I've decided to learn by heart. I've nearly committed it to memory when the recitation is interrupted. Images invade my mind

-of me on my back, arms pressed above my head. Then I'm in the parking lot. I look down at my white stomach, then up at my brother.

His expression is unforgettable: not anger or rage. There is no fury in it. Only pleasure, unperturbed. Then a part of me understands, even as I begin to argue against it, that my humiliation was the cause of that pleasure. It was not an accident or side effect. It was the objective.

This half-knowledge works in me like a kind of possession, and for a few minutes I'm taken over by it. I rise from my bed, retrieve my journal, and do something I have never done before: I write what happened. I do not use vague, shadowy language, as I have done in other entries; I do not hide behind hints and suggestion. I write what I remember: There was one point when he was forcing me from the car, that he had both hands pinned above my head and my shirt rose up. I asked him to let me fix it but it was like he couldn't hear me. He just stared at it like a great big jerk. It's a good thing I'm as small as I am. If I was larger, at that moment, I would have torn him apart.

“I DON'T KNOW WHAT you've done to your wrist," Dad told me the next morning, "but you're no good on the crew like that. You might as well head back to Utah.”

The drive to BYU was hypnotic; by the time I arrived, my memories of the previous day had blurred and faded.

They were brought into focus when I checked my email. There was a message from Shawn. An apology. But he'd apologized already, in my room. I had never known Shawn to apologize twice.

I retrieved my journal and I wrote another entry, opposite the first, in which I revised the memory. It was a misunderstanding, I wrote. If I'd asked him to stop, he would have.

But however I chose to remember it, that event would change everything. Reflecting on it now I'm amazed by it, not by what happened, but that I wrote what happened. That from somewhere inside that brittle shell-in that girl made vacant by the fiction of invincibility-there was a spark left.

The words of the second entry would not obscure the words of the first. Both would remain, my memories set down alongside his.

There was a boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out either the one page or the other. To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else's. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don't know. I just don't know.

Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs. (665 Words)

Geetha Ch 23 – Tara gets a scholarship from Brigham Young University, courtesy of a Mormon bishop

THE FORMS SAT ON my desk for a week before Robin walked with me to the post office and watched me hand them to the postal worker. It didn't take long, a week, maybe two. I was cleaning houses in Draper when the mail came, so Robin left the letter on my bed with a note that I was a Commie now.

I tore open the envelope and a check fell onto my bed. For four thousand dollars. I felt greedy, then afraid of my greed. There was a contact number. I dialed it.

"There's a problem," I told the woman who answered. "The check is for four thousand dollars, but I only need fourteen hundred."

The line was silent.

"Hello? Hello?"

"Let me get this straight," the woman said. "You're saying the check is for too much money? What do you want me to do?"

"If I send it back, could you send me another one? I only need fourteen hundred. For a root canal."

"Look, honey," she said. "You get that much because that's how much you get. Cash it or don't, it's up to you."

I had the root canal. I bought my textbooks, paid rent, and had money left over. The bishop said I should treat myself to something, but I said I couldn't, I had to save the money. He told me I could afford to spend some. "Remember," he said, "you can apply for the same amount next year." I bought a new Sunday dress.

I'd believed the money would be used to control me, but what it did was enable me to keep my word to myself: for the first time, when I said I would never again work for my father, I believed it.

I wonder now if the day I set out to steal that tax return wasn't the first time I left home to go to Buck's Peak. That night I had entered my father's house as an intruder. It was a shift in mental language, a surrendering of where I was from.

My own words confirmed it. When other students asked where I was from, I said, "I'm from Idaho," a phrase that, as many times as I've had to repeat it over the years, has never felt comfortable in my mouth. When you are part of a place, growing that moment in its soil, there's never a need to say you're from there. I never uttered the words "I'm from Idaho" until I'd left it. (417 words)

Shoba – Ch 28 Tara writes an essay in Cambridge University

Professor Steinberg was in his seventies but I would not have described him as an old man. He was lithe, and his eyes moved about the room with probing energy. His speech was measured and fluid. 

“I am Professor Steinberg,” he said. “What would you like to read?”

I mumbled something about historiography. I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I'd felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement-since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. …  Dad could be wrong, and the great historians Carlyle and Macaulay and Trevelyan could be wrong, but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it.

I doubt I managed to communicate any of this. When I finished talking, Professor Steinberg eyed me for a moment, then said, "Tell me about your education. Where did you attend school?" The air was immediately sucked from the room.

"I grew up in Idaho," I said.

"And you attended school there?"

It occurs to me in retrospect that someone might have told Professor Steinberg about me, perhaps Dr. Kerry. Or perhaps he perceived that I was avoiding his question, and that made him curious. Whatever the reason, he wasn't satisfied until I had admitted that I'd never been to school.

"How marvelous," he said, smiling. "It's as if I've stepped into Shaw's Pygmalion."

FOR TWO MONTHS I had weekly meetings with Professor Steinberg. I was never assigned readings. We read only what I asked to read, whether it was a book or a page.

None of my professors at BYU had examined my writing the way Professor Steinberg did. No comma, no period, no adjective or adverb was beneath his interest. He made no distinction between grammar and content, between form and substance. A poorly written sentence was a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction. "Tell me," he would say, "why have you placed this comma here? What relationship between these phrases are you hoping to establish?" When I gave my explanation sometimes he would say, "Quite right," and other times he would correct me with lengthy explanations of syntax.

After I'd been meeting with Professor Steinberg for a month, I wrote an essay comparing Edmund Burke with Publius, the persona under which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay had written The Federalist Papers. I barely slept for two weeks: every moment my eyes were open, I was either reading or thinking about those texts.

...

To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration. … There was a thrill in trusting myself to read the words. I felt a similar thrill in reading Madison, Hamilton and Jay, especially on those occasions when I discarded their conclusions in favor of Burke's, or when it seemed to me that their ideas were not really different in substance, only in form. There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble.

I finished the essay and sent it to Professor Steinberg. Two days later, when I arrived for our next meeting, he was subdued. He peered at me from across the table. I waited for him to say the essay was a disaster, the product of an ignorant mind, that it had overreached, drawn too many conclusions from too little material.

"I have been teaching in Cambridge for thirty years," he said. "And this is one of the best essays I've read." (639 words)

Joe – Ch 36 Tara’s mother and father arrive in Harvard to convert her back to the faith

Dad's eyes were fixed on me. It was the gaze of a seer, of a holy oracle whose power and authority were drawn from the very universe. I wanted to meet it head-on, to prove I could withstand its weight, but after a few seconds something in me buckled, some inner force gave way, and my eyes dropped to the floor.

"I am called of God to testify that disaster lies ahead of you," Dad said. "It is coming soon, very soon, and it will break you, break you utterly. It will knock you down into the depths of humility. And when you are there, when you are lying broken, you will call on the Divine Father for mercy." Dad's voice, which had risen to fever pitch, now fell to a murmur. "And He will not hear you."

I met his gaze. He was burning with conviction; I could almost feel the heat rolling off him. He leaned forward so that his face was nearly touching mine and said, "But I will." The silence settled, undisturbed, oppressive.

"I will offer, one final time, to give you a blessing," he said.

The blessing was a mercy. He was offering me the same terms of surrender he had offered my sister. I imagined what a relief it must have been for her, to realize she could trade her reality-the one she shared with me-for his. How grateful she must have felt to pay such a modest price. I could not judge her for her choice, but in that moment I knew I could not choose it for myself. Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn't a demon: it was me.

Dad reached into his pocket and withdrew a vial of consecrated oil, which he placed in my palm. I studied it. This oil was the only thing needed to perform the ritual, that and the holy authority resting in my father's misshapen hands. I imagined my surrender, imagined closing my eyes and recanting my blasphemies. I imagined how I would describe my change, my divine transformation, what words of gratitude I would shout. The words were ready, fully formed and waiting to leave my lips.

But when my mouth opened they vanished.

"I love you," I said. "But I can't. I'm sorry, Dad." My father stood abruptly.

He said again there was an evil presence in my room, that he couldn't stay another night. Their flight was not until morning, but Dad said it was better to sleep on a bench than with the devil.

My mother bustled about the room, shoveling shirts and socks into their suitcase. Five minutes later, they were gone. (548 words)