Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 November 2021
Tara Westover wrote this autobiographical account in 2015, when she was 29. She had broken with some members of her family. The story she tells is truly appalling, its horrors, until near the end, overshadowing her achievements in life.
She was born in 1986 in Idaho, the daughter of Gene, a strict and hard-working farmer, builder and scrap dealer. He was an extreme and controlling Mormon fundamentalist. He was awaiting the Days of Abomination, when the sinners would be separated from the saved at the End of Days. He was suspicious of a godless government, and Tara, at the age of seven, had no birth certificate), no medical records, and had not been to school (except to a Mormon Sunday school), and, like her six older siblings – five brothers and one sister - had been indoctrinated by their father’s crazy beliefs.
Several of Gene’s children, including Tara, worked with him in the scrapyard. He was totally irresponsible in the use he made of the potentially lethal machinery there and what he told his children to do, with the result that Tara, and later he brother Luke, had very bad accidents. In the end, Gene himself had a horrific accident, resulting in a fiery explosion which scorched much of his body, permanently disfigured his face and hands and affected his lungs. He attributed the accident and his survival for a still active life to the Lord’s will.
Gene fulminated against young women who, he thought, dressed immodestly and flaunted their bodies. When, at the age of 15, Tara’s body began to change, she became inhibited about her own body, though she dressed modestly.
Tara’s mother, Faye was an unlicensed midwife, a herbalist and eventually a faith healer. She had a huge clientele and had many assistants to help prepare her ointments and tinctures. Though not as extreme in her Mormonism as Gene, she loyally backed him, gave Tara no support, and agreed with Gene’s excoriation of any medicines other than herbal ones, and did not allow Tara to take any medicine other than her mother’s herbal concoctions.
Shawn, one of Tara’s brothers, was a manipulative and violent psychopath. Tara suffered many times from his excruciating violence towards her, though he always apologized afterwards. Her mother knew about this, but did nothing to protect her. When Tara told Gene about it, he refused to believe it.
One would have thought that Tara would hate her father and Shawn, but she accepted all that was done to her, and even felt love for Gene and for Shawn.
But her brother Tyler told her that, for her own good, she should leave home and enrol in Brigham Young University (BYU, a Mormon university), as he had. Tara began to study for the admissions test She passed, and was now away from home at least in term time.
In a psychology course she learnt about bi-polar disorder and was sure that Gene suffered from it, and that that was what had had such a devastating effect on his family. She now made a conscious decision to free herself from her father’s influence and to become “normal”.
One of her professors at BYU thought highly of her and thought she ought to be stretched further by going on a programme to Cambridge University in England. It is not exactly clear how it was that she applied and was accepted. But, although her professors there thought she was first class, she never felt comfortable there and was glad to return to BYU for her graduation there when the programme ended.
It’s all confusing after that. In view of how uncomfortable she had been at Cambridge, what made her sit for a scholarship for Cambridge and return there in 2008, aged 22, to Trinity College? In the press and TV interviews that followed her winning the scholarship, she had never mentioned that she had been home-schooled; and her father bitterly resented that. Her parents refused to attend her graduation, and her father disapproved of her returning to Cambridge.
There again she soon blossomed academically, and her supervisor thought highly of her. She worked on a Ph.D about Mormon theology.
She was awarded a visiting fellowship at Harvard. Her parents came to see her at Harvard. Gene, more crazy than ever, was on a mission to reconvert her, and Faye was a certain as he was that Tara was possessed by Lucifer. Tara was tempted to renounce her recent life, but she resisted, though, after they had left, she had a complete breakdown, with nightmares at night and unable to work in daytime. She even flew back to Idaho, but she had scarcely got home before she left again to return to Harvard, and, when the visiting fellowship was over, back to Cambridge. For a long time she could not work on her Ph.D. She had written to her parents a letter full of abuse, saying she would cut contact with them. She went into counselling, and after a long time was able to work again and eventually got her Ph.D. in 2013.
For a long time she rehearsed in her mind her grievances against Gene, but the counselling must have helped her at long last to shed her guilt. “It was the only way I could love him.”
Her maternal grandmother had died, and Tara returned to Idaho for her funeral. Her parents were not present: Gene had fallen out with Faye’s sister, and Faye would not attend without him. But all Tara’s uncles and aunts and all her siblings were there. Her sister was hostile to her; Shawn ignored her; but all the others accepted her, despite what Gene had said to them about her. She would be close to three of her brothers. She had a family again.