Learning to break bonds
In the prologue to Tara Westover’s astounding autobiography, she looks back on herself as a 7-yearold girl, standing on the abandoned red railway carriage that lies next to the barn on her family’s Idaho farm and scrap metal yard.
She gazes along the peaceful valley to Buck Peak, the mountain that features so strongly in her father’s dystopian mythology and therefore her own. Tara has never set foot in a school, has no birth certificate and no medical records as her father believes schools, hospitals and civil authorities to be the source of all evil.
This moment, as the school bus rumbles by, stands as a first signpost in her awareness of her difference and the possibility of other ways of living.
Tara’s fiercely fundamentalist Mormon household is dominated by a man preparing for the End of Days with ruthless, bipolar conviction. Her complicit mother is a herbalist, healer and midwife, who home-schools her brood, but only to a rudimentary level. Her ultimate betrayal of her daughter seems worse for the glimmers of sanity she allows.
While several of the seven siblings have left, one brother, in particular, remains close in Tara’s experience. Brain-damaged and alternately caring and violently, abusively cruel, he labels Tara “whore” for showing too much ankle, smiling too broadly at a boy and smearing some gloss on her teenage lips.
That he might kill her is not far-fetched.
But for all that — and the details of her life are as riveting as they are terrible — Tara is also held tight in the equally powerful embrace of family loyalty. This loyalty will be the most difficult thing for her to deal with as she, at 16, commits to getting an education and embarks on the painful journey of reinventing herself.
After graduating from Brigham Young University, Westover was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, received an MPhil in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and a PhD in the same subject in 2014.
In this, her first book, her obvious intellect cannot be ignored but it is her emotional intelligence that shines through: candid, honest, warm and with a generous understanding of her self and her family, seemingly devoid of anger or vengeance.
The little girl, who to the authorities simply did not exist; the teenager whose being was defined in one ugly and totally undeserved word by a brother; the young woman who fought long and debilitating internal battles to feel she actually belonged in the highest halls of academia in which she outwardly shone, remains estranged from her family but on their account, not hers.
Her story is intensely gripping in its detail but beyond that lies a lesson for all: that the earliest bonds that define us are forever a part of the fabric of our being, cannot be deleted but only understood and lived with forever, with compassion.