Her dad’s a die-hard survivalist who stockpiled guns for Judgment Day and refused tol et hergotoschool.So how DID Tara win a place at Cambridge?
When American student Tara Westover arrived at Cambridge and found herself living in the magnificent surroundings of King’s College, her joy in her achievement was muted by a deep sense of unworthiness.
‘I didn’t think I was dreaming, but only because my imagination had never produced anything so grand,’ she recalls.
After her tutor, a senior professor of history, described an essay she’d written as one of the best he’d read in 30 years, those feelings intensified and her self-loathing boiled over.
After suffering so much abuse as a child, such praise came as ‘poison’ to her. Just being at Cambridge had put into ‘great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life’.
All she could think of were the days — too numerous to count — when her brother, violent and psychotic, would twist one arm behind her back as he rammed her head down a lavatory.
For Tara had endured an extraordinary childhood in the backwoods of Idaho. She had never attended school — the authorities didn’t even know of her existence. her parents so distrusted the outside world that they hadn’t registered her birth.
Beyond the barest of home schooling, Tara’s ‘education’ was geared to how to prepare for what her fundamentalist Mormon family called the Days of Abomination, the inevitable end of the world prophesied in the Bible when ‘the sun would turn to darkness and the moon to blood’.
She knew little of the world beyond the brutally hard and impoverished existence on a remote mountainside farm with paranoid, survivalist parents who would rather let their seven children die than use modern medicine. And yet, this determined young g woman managed to turn her life e around and win a scholarship to o Cambridge, where she later studied d for a PhD.
now, 31 and living in Britain, Tara ra has revealed her remarkable story and d amazing resilience in a critically ly acclaimed autobiography.
In educated, she writes of her efforts ts to break free from a domineering and nd mentally- unstable father who ho stockpiled guns, tinned peaches and nd other supplies against a world that he expected God would soon reclaim from om the Devil.
One of her earliest memories of Gene ene Westover, who she describes as sa a ‘charismatic gale of a man’, was of him reading a line from the Book of Isaiah aiah about milk and honey.
he then decided that dairy products ucts were the work of Lucifer and banned ned them from the house, instead buying vast amounts of honey. A hardcore conspiracy theorist, , he believed that an evil secret cret society known as the Illuminati inati was running the world and that the new millennium of 2000 would usher in the second cond coming of Christ.
he and his wife, Faye, were convinced the U.S government ment was doing the devil’s work k and that state schools were ere a government ‘ ploy’ to lead children away from God.
Tara and her siblings spent their days slopping out pigs gs and toiling in their father’s scrap metal junkyard. The farm sat at the base of Buck’s Peak mountain in a ‘jagged little patch of Idaho’ filled with wild horses and rattlesnakes. This isolated home was all that Gene had known, and all he intended his children to know.
Tara, the youngest child, was ten when her father took her to his junkyard and taught her how to pick out the aluminium and steel from the tangled scrap. It was a hazardous job as he would hurl around large pieces of sharp metal, and insisted his children use lethal metal-cutting machinery.
SHOULD THEY injure themselves — and they frequently did, sometimes severely — he refused to take them to hospital. Doctors, too, were the spawn of Satan — or ‘sons of perdition’ as the Westovers called them.
Gene did his best to ensure that his brainwashed children were exposed to the outside world as little as possible: no TV or radio and, for many years, not even a phone.
he did, however, want them to know about the fate of another family of ‘ freedom fighters’ in Idaho. In 1992, the notorious 11- day Ruby Ridge siege had led to the deaths of three people when trigger-happy federal agents came to arrest an alleged white supremacist over firearms charges.
The incident convinced Gene that the ‘ Feds’ were coming for his family, too.
‘After that, he was at war, even if the war was only in his head,’ writes Tara.
every member of the family had to sleep alongside a ‘head for the hills’ emergency bag containing survival gear and supplies and he equipped his five sons with rifles. he himself had an immensely powerful .50 calibre rifle — to shoot down approaching government helicopters — and insisted that Tara practise firing it.
he urged his wife, Faye, to learn midwifery so that she could deliver their future grandchildren after the apocalypse arrived. She was also a herbalist, which Gene considered sufficient training to tend to the family’s medical needs. (A catastrophic road crash later left Faye with serious brain injuries, which went untreated, and she was plagued by terrible headaches.)
Faye was not quite as extreme as her husband but entirely dominated by him. She was responsible for giving the children what little education they had. Tara learned to read and write through reading the Bible, the Book of Mormon and the speeches of Mormon leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
While most of the siblings were indifferent to what their father contemptuously called ‘book-learning’, one brother, Tyler, loved reading. he insisted on going to college, much to his father’s disgust, and it was his departure that planted the ‘seed of curiosity’ in Tara’s mind.
‘Sometimes, when I was stripping the copper from a radiator or throwing the 500th chunk of steel into a bin, I’d find myself imagining the classroom where Tyler was spending his days,’ she says.
her father, perhaps suspecting her interest, tried to keep her away from books, finding chores for her to do whenever he saw her reading.
The new millennium arrived but failed to trigger global catastrophe, which Tara — aged 15 by then — said ‘ broke Dad’s spirit’, although it didn’t break his religious fervour. She believes her father was suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, which explained his paranoia and extreme mood swings.
her brother Shawn had much in common with their father and embraced his deranged ideas, combining them with terrible violence, she claims.
At the slightest perceived offence, he would grab his sister by the hair and shove her face into a lavatory bowl so her nose scraped the porcelain — an ordeal that became so habitual she would clean it every day in readiness.
early one morning, hours after Shawn had discovered her trying out lip gloss, she awoke to find her brother’s hands around her throat as he screamed ‘Slut!’ and ‘Whore!’.
Fortunately, she had allies. Tyler, the brother who had escaped to college, urged her to do the same, and even her mother quietly encouraged her — out of her husband’s hearing.
At 16, Tara made an 80-mile round trip just to buy an algebra textbook so she could study for the ACT, a
standardised test used for U.S. college admissions.
Her father accused her of ‘whoring after man’s knowledge instead of God’s’ and warned her to await God’s wrath. He had expected that she would marry at the age of 17 or 18 and, with her new Mormon husband, build a house in a corner of his farm.
She had other ideas. At the second attempt, she got the ACT score she needed for Brigham Young University, a Mormon college in Utah, although she lied about having been to high school.
Once there, she found it hard to eradicate years of conditioning: when her flatmate produced a Diet Coke, a drink her father condemned as a ‘violation of God’s counsel for health’, Tara fled the room.
She had also to come to terms with how scant her knowledge was. She knew about the Founding Fathers because her father had told her about them, and she’d ‘heard’ of Shakespeare. But not Martin Luther King, or Islam. Once, during a history lecture, a deathly hush fell when she admitted she didn’t recognise the word ‘Holocaust’ but she persevered with her studies and earned a scholarship.
Lacking the money to do anything else, she would return to the family farm during her college holidays to work in her father’s junkyard, driving the forklift or the crane. He and her brothers complained that education had made her ‘uppity’, while the psychopathic Shawn continued to ram her head down the loo when it suited him.
But she was changing. Her studies had revealed to her the extent to which her father had indoctrinated his family with his twisted view of history, keeping them in a continual state of fear for which they had paid a heavy physical and emotional price.
When she developed a sore throat, her boyfriend — her first — persuaded her to visit a doctor for the first time. It was around this time that her father suffered a horrific accident after a fuel tank exploded in his junkyard. The lower half of his face ‘liquefied’ and the fingers of one hand locked into a ‘gnarled claw’. Despite refusing medical attention, he survived and accepted the disfigurement as God’s will.
Tara’s academic life was about to take a radical turn. A history professor at Brigham who ran a ‘study abroad’ programme at the University of Cambridge persuaded her to apply and she secured a place at King’s College.
There, the history tutor who had praised her essay in such glowing terms, Professor Jonathan Steinberg, persuaded her to apply for the Gates Scholarship so that she could return to Cambridge.
Again she succeeded, becoming a local media star back in Utah. Her father complained that she hadn’t credited their home schooling, but what really irked him, he admitted, was that — now separated by the Atlantic — the family wouldn’t be able to rescue Tara when the end of the world finally came.
Tara, now at Trinity College, stayed on at Cambridge to study for a PhD in intellectual history and political thought. She says she felt guilty at embracing her comfortable, rarefied new life, and finding a new family of friends who were so different to her real one.
On a visit home she confonted her parents with the truth of her brother Shawn’s violence towards her after he told her he felt like shooting their sister Audrey.
HE COMPOUNDED her fears by one day casually dropping a knife into Tara’s hands, stained — she later discovered — with the blood of his son’s pet Alsatian, which he had just slashed to death.
Concerned for her own safety, she returned to Cambridge where Shawn rang her and, she claims, casually informed her he couldn’t decide whether to fly over and kill her himself or hire an assassin.
She was appalled when her parents took Shawn’s side and poisoned the family against her by persuading them she was possessed by the Devil. They have since disputed her account.
When a friend asked her — a question many readers of her book will surely ponder, too — why she didn’t cut herself off from her parents, she insisted she believed she could fix the problem.
For all her immense patience and loyalty, she has yet to bridge that gulf between them.
When Tara moved back to the U.S. to take up a visiting fellowship at Harvard in 2010, her parents arrived to stay in her room for a week, intent on ‘saving’ her.
She writes that she suffered a mental breakdown and, after one more failed attempt to see her mother, hasn’t seen either parent for years — although she stays in touch with three of her brothers.
At her last meeting with her father, Tara says he asked if he could bless her in a symbolic act of forgiveneness, but she refused. It would, she felt, have diminished all the years she’d spent establishing her own identity, one free of her family and their mad ways.
‘What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me,’ she says.