Miseducation
Tara Westover grew up completely off the grid in a Mormon “prepper” family in rural Idaho. Her birth wasn’t registered, and she didn’t go to school or have any medical records. According to the US government, she didn’t exist. Yet Westover went on to earn a PhD in history from Cambridge in 2014. In this extract from her autobiography, we join her as she starts university.
I’d been at Brigham Young University for three weeks. My first days had been chaotic because I was enrolled in the wrong courses. The first lecture attended was on Shakespeare, and I’d chosen the class because Shakespeare was the only name in the course that I recognised. After the lecture the professor stopped me at the door. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said matter-of-factly, eyeing my adolescent face. “This class is for seniors.”
“It is?”
“It’s 382,” she said. “You should be in 110.”
It took me all week to change my classes – then, finally, after missing the entire first week, I managed to enrol in introductory courses on music theory, history, English, religion, and Western civilisation.
Once I was in the correct classes I expected things would get easier. They didn’t. Instead, each night I stayed up until 3am. Trying – unsuccessfully – to cram a high school education into my head.
It had started during my second week, when I sat down to do my homework. I retrieved my American history textbook and began to read. Words like “Civic Humanism” and the “Scottish Enlightenment” dotted the page like black holes, sucking all the other words into them until nothing was left but empty space.
I read all night, hoping that by morning I would understand enough to answer the handful of questions I’d been given as homework. By midnight I’d made no progress, by 3, I was in a stupor. Morning dawned and I had nothing, so I scribbled a few nonsensical lines, and trudged to campus, unwashed and with dark circles under my eyes.
The rest of the week had passed in the same way, me working through the night then turning up to class and hearing the girl next to me complain about the 20 minutes she had spent on the same assignment. If I’d been riding a sow in a horse race, I couldn’t have felt more out of place.
The real low point, however, came toward the end of my second week, when my art professor had shown a painting with a title that I didn’t understand. I’d seen other students raise their hand when they had a question, so, mimicking them, I raised mine.
“Sorry,” I said loudly when the professor saw my hand. “But I don’t understand the title. I’m not familiar with the word.”
The class fell silent. Not a polite “We’re listening” silent, but a “holy-shit-did-she-really-just-say-that” kind of silence. I knew I’d said something wrong – something really, really wrong. The professor’s face dropped into a look of confusion, then his lips tightened into something closely resembling anger. “Yes, well, thanks for that,” he said, sneering.
I didn’t move for the rest of the class. I didn’t take notes. I certainly didn’t ask any more questions. I stared at my shoes, wondering what I’d done wrong and why every time I looked up someone in the class was staring at me like I was a freak. When the bell rang I’d turned to Sarah, the girl I often sat with, to ask what I’d done.
“You shouldn’t make fun of the Holocaust,” she whispered without looking at me. “It’s not a joke.”
She was upset and left without me. I stayed until everyone had gone, pretending that the zipper on my coat was stuck so I wouldn’t have to look anyone in the eye as they left. Then I went straight to the computer lab to look up the word “Holocaust”.
I don’t know how long I sat there reading – perhaps a few minutes, perhaps a few hours – but at some point I’d read enough. I stared at the screen. I guess I was in shock, but whether it was the shock of learning about something awful, or the shock of learning about my own ignorance, I’m not sure. How could this have happened without my knowing about it? How could I have missed something like this?
Istrained to remember if Mother had ever mentioned it, perhaps one morning when we were gathering herbs for her tinctures, or when I’d gone with her to deliver a baby. She must know, right? She had gone to school. She must know the things they know. Why had she never told me?
Then again, maybe she had mentioned it but I wasn’t listening. Maybe I was distracted, stealing Valaree’s rosehip stash or racing Richard to see who could gather the most yarrow leaves. In some ways the word “Holocaust” wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. Maybe Mother told us about it once, or perhaps I’d seen it referenced on TV at Grandma’s.
Now that I thought about it, I was vaguely aware of Jews being harmed in some context, but I’d imagined that it was a small conflict like the Boston Massacre, which Dad talked about sometimes, where a half-dozen people were killed by a tyrannical government. To have misunderstood it on this scale seemed impossible.
It was a bleak afternoon that bled over into a bleak evening. I was learning about a piece of history for the first time, but that was the easy part. What was difficult was learning how people talked about that history – the unspoken rules of what you can and can’t say, which aren’t written anywhere but everyone knows. Given the time I had, it was an impossible task, and people mistook my ignorance for sarcasm.
Ms Gustafson’s head popped around the corner of her carpeted wall and she motioned for me to come over. I sat down across from her. I had no idea what would happen next. I had a notebook, which I clutched with both hands as I tried, and failed, to look her in the eye.
She greeted me cheerfully. Actually, everything this woman did was cheerful – she was one of those people whose face seems engraved with a smile. I watched as she ruffled through the file on her desk, flipping through pages until she’d located my essay, then with a slight increase in her large grin she pushed it toward me, saying: “Nicely done!”
The paper was lying on the desk between us but I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Is she trying to show me the grade on the front, or am I supposed to take it? Anything seemed possible. Perhaps it is against the rules for me to touch it. Students aren’t supposed to touch exams, and this is sort of an exam, right? Will she think I’m trying to cheat if I pick it up?
The essay lay like a land mine, waiting for me to do the wrong thing and set it off. I racked my brain, frantically going through every minute of TV at Grandma’s house, looking for a moment in Boy Meets
World or Full House that would give me a clue as to what a student was supposed to do in this situation.
Ms Gustafson was still staring, waiting for me to do whatever it was that I was supposed to do. I didn’t dare take the essay but I had to do something, so I craned my neck awkwardly to look at the first page, hoping that this wouldn’t be interpreted as an attempt to cheat. This went on for several seconds: she stared, I craned.
After a few moments, she stood and retrieved the essay, giving me a look of mild exasperation. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to look at it, I thought. Maybe she took it out to look at it herself, and I was breaking the rules by staring. I felt the relief that comes when you realize you’ve narrowly avoided disaster. If she’s upset I looked at it, thank heaven I didn’t touch it!
I’d hardly finished congratulating myself when Ms Gustafson launched the essay across the table, sending it spiralling toward me. The land mine had become a rocket, and instinctively I dodged it. In fact
I half fell off my chair dodging it, before I realised that if the teacher was choosing to give me the essay it probably wasn’t against the rules to take it.
I clambered back into my chair, retrieving the essay from the floor. Ms Gustafson eyed me with that expression – which was becoming so familiar – that means to ask: “What is wrong with you?” Then she shook it off, regained her usual smile. “An A minus on your first assignment is good.” Again the TV in my head began broadcasting reruns of the Disney Channel. I’d seen enough to guess that an A was a good grade. On TV the kids who got As were the smart bookish types – the kids who were not made to go back and repeat grades. I felt relieved, almost giddy, but then the panic returned. I thought an A was good because of some TV shows, but how many times in the last three weeks had my assumptions been wrong? I remembered the awkward silence after I’d asked about the Holocaust, everyone staring at me as if I were stupid or a terrible person, and my certainty crumbled.
I was going to have to ask her. That or I could just pretend that I understood and spend the rest of the semester in confusion. “Um, excuse me,” I mumbled as quietly as I could. “But what is an A, exactly?” She stared at me blankly.
For the second time her smile faltered. “It’s-just-that-I-never-went-to-school,” I fired at her. “This-is-sort-of-my-first-class-um-ever-so-I’ve-neverreceived-a-grade-before-and-I-don’t-understandwhat-they-mean.”
An excruciating 10 seconds passed. Several times she opened her mouth but then she would close it again. Eventually she settled on a question: “Are you from Africa or something?”
Perhaps this was a joke, but if so this subtlety, like so many others, was lost on me.
I answer seriously. “Not Africa,” I said. “Idaho.”