Life lessons in art of survival
by Tara Westover Hutchinson, £14.99
TARA Westover was raised by a Mormon fundamentalist father who denied her an education. But as a teenager she started to educate herself, fitting her learning around long hours working in her father’s perilous scrap metal yard. Within 10 years she had earned a doctorate from Cambridge and an MPhil from Harvard.
Her account of growing up in a household of dangerous religious fervour and finding redemption in education is astonishing, harrowing and brave.
Tara, now 31, and her six siblings grew up on a remote mountain in Idaho where her survivalist father Gene, a “charismatic gale of a man”, was obsessed with achieving self-sufficiency to ensure his family’s survival after the Days Of Abomination.
He refused to send his children to school because it was “a ploy by the government to lead children away from God”. So from the age of 10, Tara was set to work in her father’s yard.
It is remarkable that she has lived to tell the tale. Tara suffers an awful injury when her father orders her to climb into a flatbed trailer containing up to 40,000 pounds of iron and to climb out when he starts tipping the scrap out. But Tara ends up pinned inside the trailer where an iron spike is embedded in her leg. Her father is unfazed because “If you are hurt, then that is His will.”
Many years later Tara heard a professor of psychology describe the symptoms of bipolar disorder and it perfectly summed up Gene’s behavioural patterns.
Even more dangerous than his attitude towards education is his fear of the medical profession, meaning her mother treats a wound that needs stitches with juniper and mullein flower. “We were bruised and gashed and concussed, had our legs set on fire and our heads cut open. We had lived in... a kind of constant terror... because Dad always put faith before safety... after the first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it was us who paid.”
Tara is also bullied by her brutal older brother Shawn. When he breaks her wrist or pushes her head down the toilet, her coping mechanism is “to hollow” herself out. But her parents turn a blind eye.
Then Tara’s older brother Tyler enrols in school, later leaving home to go to college against his father’s wishes. For Tara “the seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow”. So Tara gradually edges her way towards the education that will be her salvation.
She eventually teaches herself enough maths to gain a place at university but her father throws her out of the house. Her mother defends her father, pointing out: “You’re at least 20... aren’t you?” Tara is 16.
The culture shock of university makes for fascinating reading with Tara horribly out of her depth. A notable low came when she told a disbelieving tutor that she didn’t know what “holocaust” meant. She goes to the computer lab to google “holocaust” and is as shocked by her own ignorance as by the appalling facts.
Tara goes on to win scholarships that are impressive by any standards but particularly for someone who never went to school. But the price she pays is a growing breach with her parents. Her father visits her at Harvard only because she has been “taken by Lucifer” and he wants to perform a “priesthood blessing” to cast out her demons.
ULTIMATELY she finds herself forced to make a heartbreaking choice between family and education. To Tara education is “not as a means to making a living but a way of making a person”, a way to take “custody of my own mind... what my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon, it was me”.
Tara sees no true alternative to choosing freedom, knowledge and the opportunity to forge her own path in life. But that she is ever put into such an unthinkable position makes for a shocking and powerfully moving memoir.