Educated: A Conversation with Tara Westover

[Music] needs no introduction so I want to jump in but I want to ask I do want to ask a question first how many people have read this book right so we don't really have a spoiler alert problem doing one of them one of the miracles of this book and it's my favorite book of the last year one of the miracles no it's true I told you that it's true I say that to every author I interview hereby except last night I didn't say it last night actually that's an inside joke that's not actually that inside I guess the it's it's my favorite book and there is this one of the miracles of this book is that you you know it reads as many different kind of books as one and in part there's a there's a suspense a thriller the horror story even and and you're reading it and you're thinking god I hope she lives and you obviously know that she lives because she wrote the book and and yet it's so propulsive and so tension making that it's one of the it's one of your gifts as a as a writer so since everybody here are almost already here has has read this book I don't think we're gonna have to spend a lot of time talking about the the bare-bones story but you can refer to it obviously whenever whenever you need to might Mike my question for you my opening question for you is this it's an extraordinarily specific story obviously not a lot of people grow up the way you grow up that might be the understatement of the day the but there's something sufficiently Universal about this that people are drawn to it by noting that noting that it's a New York Times bestseller notes only part of the story this book is sold more than 2 million copies in hardcover so far in the United States alone ok it's just go go go with my story go with it just go in it it's extraordinarily popular book popular books often are rooted in something specific but have a universal message what do you think your readers are getting from this book what are they taking out of this Oh it's nice soft questions start you can handle it what are they getting out of it um I think that you're you're absolutely right it's a principle of storytelling that the universal is always best explored in the specific and we're told that but I think when you're writing it it never feels that way I remember when I was writing educated I felt like this book is gonna be so great with like little girls you're raising I don't never went to school I worked in their dad's junkyard they are gonna love this like all ten of them and and then I don't I don't know how anyone else could find anything in this but um I don't know I mean I intentionally wrote it so that I wouldn't know the answer to that question because I wanted it to be an experience so there's you have a lot of choices when you're writing about your own life you can you can tell a few stories kind of anecdotes and then you can slip into a different voice and say this is what this means you can give a lot of opinions and that's not a bad way to go I didn't go that way I wrote it to be an experience in the sense that I wanted I wanted to stay in specific moments and I didn't want to step outside and say this is what it means and the thing is about letting people have an experience instead of something more like an essay is that two people can have the same experience and come to really different conclusions about it and so I kind of wrote the book in such a way that people I hoped could have some little piece of experiences I had and I wanted them to I wanted that to go through a filter of their own lives that would distort it in a way so I didn't put any pictures with my family and part of that was to preserve their privacy but the other part of it was if somebody reads the book and sees their father instead of my father or their mother sort of my mother and disregards the bits of my story that don't quite fit I'm okay with that distortion it's kind of what I was going for and it's one of the weird things about the book is I had people come up to me and get all kinds of things from it I had people come up to me and say I'm just really happy for you because I'm so sure that reconciliation with your parents is right around the corner and I asked people come up to me and say I'm so glad that you're never going back there again and the dots sorted and I'm both I just smile and nod and I know it has everything to do with them and like nothing to do with me you know and that's what a story should do I think to tell us about writing what is the most popular memoir of the year youth everybody in this room well there's there's little Michelle Obama but apart from that that's also a big seller I understand but but one day you're known in your small academic community among your friends the next day you're in a room like this and most people here know details of your life you'll never know the details of their lives of our lives well what is it like to just put that out there into the world and I guess that the deeper question is did you ever expect so many people to be so fascinated by your own life no I mean it's kind of a it's like I think it's something you're unconscious can't really get come to terms with as far as I know I wrote this book in my dingy little room at some point I emailed it to somebody and I'm not sure that on a conscious level I really understand like how did it come to be that people have read it as far as I'm it's on my laptop as far as I know and then people come up to me and they tell me something from the book and I have this kind of instinctual response like how do you know like who told you that and then I remember oh yeah it's it's something right it's a book it's weird and I mean there's a physical object that's there but I don't I don't know the format that I'm used to it in is thus laptop I wrote it on the had a cracked screen that was permanently blue that is the format that I think of it and the book is weird before we talk about your life since the book came out to talk about that moment I'd love to understand the moment when you realized that you had something to say and you're sitting alone in that dingy room and you decide that your life story is worth telling what was the bring us up to that moment when you said you know what I'm gonna just write this whole damn thing and whatever happens happens I had been told by several of my professors that I had this kind of unusual path through education that I should write about education and I thought about that and thought yeah I think I'll do that because I've been to these institutions Harvard Yale and I noticed not you a Harvard and Cambridge just made up another school by the way Yale would be happy to claim here so we just got here but I I just had never met anyone like me at these places and I don't even mean like me and the sense of raised by survivalists I meant just from a small town and I just felt like yeah there's an experience of a lot of people that is just not being represented here so I thought yeah I'll write it the education side all right but the family side I thought I'm not going anywhere near that and I'd convinced myself that it was possible to write just about my education and just leave the family out of it I don't really know what I thought that book would be like it would be a drier book about education in rural America what was your like I never went to school but we're not gonna talk about why right it would just it would be odd and then I started trying to write it and I there just wasn't away the things had to be explained and I think eventually as I started getting a little more comfortable with the idea of writing about my upbringing my family and that whole process of self creation self-defending all of that I started realizing the story of my family and the story of my education is really the same story and it's not really possible to separate them because the way that I the the process of my education and all the things that that gave to me it did all the things that we expect our education session to do it made me more employable I had a degree from a nice from nice universities I could apply for jobs I wouldn't even able to get before so it had that effect but it had a whole other effect on the way that I lived my life on the choices that I made what I thought a good life consisted of and that would have huge ramifications for the relationships I had but when you were growing up what did you think a good life consisted of I didn't I don't know if I would have thought of it in those terms I just thought there's a path that was carved out for you and you you did that path I mean there was I remember I wrote a journal entry and I was 12 that I was asked to imagine for church I was asked to imagine what my life would be like in I think five years so 17 and I was like well I'll be married I'll have a kid I really just this was this was life I was gonna homeschool them I was gonna become a midwife like my mother I had it all I had it all planned out it wasn't necessarily what I wanted it was just what what there was right when did you first dream of something other than that oh I think from me it was it was music and I can't really excel people you know my brother introduced me to opera and choir music when I was probably 7 or 8 and there was the first time that I had heard music that was just so you know organic in the sense that it was it was clear even to my seven-year-old ears this isn't nobody knows how to sing like an opera singer from birth you have to go somewhere and someone teaches you how to do this and it's rigorous and it was the first time I think it occurred to me that there were things on the mountain like there might be a reason to leave the mountain there were other things that were worth going and finding because I was just really gripped by the sound of that music and so I decided that I was gonna go to college so that I could study music that's that's really what motivated me and so I bought a study guide and I taught myself algebra which didn't didn't go that well but it went okay and it's a funny thing to tell people but I mean it really sincerely I don't think it's a stretch to say I taught myself algebra because I like to sing like that is there anything and I don't know if there's a lesson or a moral to draw from it except for maybe this I think we should probably be a little bit cautious or reflective before we kill any passion that appears in a child because I think passion really what it is it's just a love of hard work and it's pretty rare and it's hard to create and in my own case I loved music so I learned my side I taught out Thomas of algebra I went to BYU at BYU I discovered philosophy I became kind of obsessed with that that took me to Cambridge at Cambridge I discovered writing I liked that so I wrote a book so I think you don't necessarily know where a love of something will will take you but you know that if you don't have any love for something for things like you'll go nowhere so I think it might be a defense for forgiving giving students giving kids just allowing them their passions let them have it without the external intervention of your brother on music do you think you would not be who you are today it's a broader question obviously about how to find kids in isolation and give them show them some possibilities I'm terrible with counterfactuals but I I think it's unlikely that without some interventions there has to be a path you know I mean you can't climb out without a ladder there has to be a way to do that and I think it's it's hard because for some kids it's gonna be money and for some kids it's gonna be other kinds of emotional support I benefitted tremendously from support from all different kinds of quarters and and quarters that would be kind of surprising I think to people so when I was at BYU I had a bishop who's kind of a Mormon equivalent of a pastor over the congregation and he had ideas about gender that I don't agree with it all and I expect a lot of people in this room wouldn't agree with me that women should you essentially stay at home others didn't think they should work and he had this when I was going to drop out of school because I need a root canal and I didn't have the money for it just was incredibly devoted to me to this idea that I was just I was not gonna leave school over this root canal and so he he spent several weeks trying to convince me to take money from the church which I wasn't I wasn't willing to do and then he tried to convince me to take money from the government which I wouldn't do is my dad had told me that was evil and so no no Pell grants and then he was just at the end of his rope so he opened his drawer pulled out his personal checkbook and wrote me a check for $1400 which I've never done that to someone I don't know that well so I think sometimes help came from unusual places I guess and it's it's an unfortunate tendency I think to see people almost entirely through this prism of ideology and think that if we know one thing about a person that we know everything about them so we know that this man has a belief that women should be at home and we don't realize that that doesn't mean he is not capable of incredible acts of compassion and seeing I felt like he saw me as a person I saw that I wanted to stay in school I don't feel like he saw me as a category and it can be hard for me when people want to see him as a category I want to loop around back to this broad subject and we've been talking about rural education and all kinds of subjects but I want to stay on under life as a writer for a minute I think I know I'm curious about this that moment the moment you become a real writer is the moment when you realize that everything is fodder for the writing and and okay have you well they're family I mean what's the you know what's a great it's an old curse you know may you be may you have a writer in the family because you know you might find yourself exposed in ways that you don't want in the interest of truth when did you get comfortable with the idea of writing about your family warts and all or have you gotten comfortable yet with I'll let you know if that ever happens um I I would say I'm comfortable with it because I have control over it and you can hide behind language quite a bit I think I don't know if that makes sense to anybody else but I'm comfortable with it in as far as I can see a point to what I'm doing and so that was my ultimate goal with everything that I wrote about my family there were there were loads of things that I remember making lists and thinking well this is a very dramatic scene people will like it's it's dramatic but I couldn't I couldn't think of what the point of it was and I couldn't think of why it mattered and so I I put it aside and I think there's things like yeah I feel conflicted about them and they're people that I care about and I don't know how they're gonna feel about what I'm writing and I think you have to take responsibility for that in a way I don't think that there's a perfectly clean answer to that in telling your own story you're gonna have to tell other people's stories and there's not a way around it and you can't pretend like it's not complicated it is complicated and the only place I could get to that allowed me to write it is that I felt like there was a larger point to what I was doing and then I tried to be as gentle as I possibly could and be as empathetic as I possibly could and if if there was something that I knew would just be a sexy scene for the book or something I just didn't put it in if it didn't need to be there I didn't put it in can you tell us about your relations with your family now but pretty much the way they were the way they were at the end of the book some of my aunts and uncles and cousins responded a lot more supportively to look than I expected and so I've gotten closer to some of them some of my siblings have struggled with the book but mostly mostly the way that you would expect if you if you read it I don't think it's too shocking from yeah from that can you talk a little bit about the survivalist impulse you know we talk a lot about Preppers in America we talked about this fracturing of America and secessionism and all sorts of thing could you talk about the mentality that motivates people toward or survivalist lifestyle probably if I think about it it's a feeling of never quite feeling secure I think I think that's certainly part of it I think that there are pockets in American history that I mean for one thing it's a massive country and so there are a lot of people that live in a kind of relative isolation and I think it's very easy for people to feel people where I'm from at least to feel like even the state government and Boise just doesn't understand or represent them at all because there's no overlap and as soon as the thing that is making all the rules in your life that has a lot of control over you is completely foreign to you and doesn't feel like you at all I don't think it's so surprising that in rural areas people have a lot of skepticism local government because if you think about what is your experience of the federal government at the state government if you live in Boston the government provides roads the schools are pretty good you have healthcare your experience in the government is gonna be relatively positive you know you don't like paying taxes but you get things back for that if you drop where I grew up the roads are plowed whenever the hell they want to they have holes in them the schools are struggling it's hard for schools in rural areas to get teachers those kids tend not to go to universities is a real problem with rural education the the main way that you're gonna interact with the government is gonna be requirements in agriculture that don't make any sense or speeding tickets I mean I never had a positive interaction with the government till I got a Pell Grant when I was 20 was the first time that I thought oh it does useful things sometimes this is actually good was it a big decision for you given how you father had raised you I would take that back why were you what was the manifestation of being erect my dad had told me that the if you took money from the government one thing God would be angry with you which I was trying generally he's making an effort but also that it was a way that the government would manipulate you that it would get you it would make you dependent on that money and then you would you would never gain your independence back and my experience of it was actually completely different it was the first summer that I didn't have to go home I work for my dad which I'd sworn I would never do again but I always had to do send the money and that was the first time I was able to keep my promise to myself because I I was I was not financially desperate but also I think the biggest benefit that you get when you have any money at all is that you suddenly are able to think about things besides money and if you don't have money your whole brain is just occupied with getting it and getting enough to get through the next day or the next week and I was a terrible student in the sense I don't think I learned very much until I was financially somewhat secure which didn't take a lot of money it's just like a little bit of money but the difference it made to me was pretty enormous right talk a little bit about your your thinking today about the country and about the rural urban divide we've talked about this a little bit and I know this is a preoccupation of yours you've suggested that there's a lack of sympathy or maybe too much condescension or contempt one side to another you obviously live in a completely different world now than you live then but you have an understanding I think that's fairly unique of the world from which you came can you talk about that a little bit your understanding yeah I mean I live in New York now and I go back to Idaho a couple times a year and my family are mostly there and the biggest thing that I notice when I'm in New York and I hear people talking about rural people or Trump supporters or whatever category are using my response is always just like who the hell yeah who are these people like I don't know these people I've never met these people that you're describing but I feel the same way when I'm in Idaho and I hear them describing New Yorkers they just have the same exact response like who are you talking about and I think to me that's the biggest problem that we have there's a there's a word for that I particularly like or a phrase the breaking of charity and it came out of the Salem witch trials and it to break charity with someone it it refers to that moment where two members are the same tribe disfellowship one another and they decide that they belong in different tribes and that to me is the biggest political social problem that we have more than any particular issue any of these super contentious abortion gun rights whatever it is that we think or any single politician I think all of that is is just it's just the side effect of that fundamental fact that people no longer feel like people on the other side are part of the same tribe and the thing is what we know about persuasion is you can't actually persuade anybody by yelling at them and if the only thing that you know about a person is that they voted for someone you don't like your ability to persuade them not to do that is entirely compromised and the only way that anybody has ever been persuaded of anything is by someone who cared about them understood them understood their point of view and was able to incorporate all of that into an argument that changed their mind it's the only way anybody's ever changed their mind about anything and I know because I've had to change my mind about pretty much everything and and that's how that's how it was done for me I remember my first night one of my first nights in Cambridge I I went out to dinner and I it was 2008 and everyone's talking about the prop 8 campaign in California and I said bunch of things like I said in this room I'd probably get stoned but I believe them I've grown up with these a very homophobic ideas and they were my ideas I was saying them and this guy stayed up all night arguing with me about it and the way that he did it was just incredible where he essentially kind of excised them from me and would say things to me like you seem like a good person how does this fit in like is this really where does this come from because here's you and then here's these ideas and I don't really see where they fit in and it you know it kind of for one thing I didn't have to be as defensive and um you know by the end of the night I went home and I thought it over and I thought yeah I don't know if I ever want to say those things again aren't you in one sense and advertisement against this kind of exposure if you are socially conservative person in Idaho or wherever and you look at your transformation your your time at Harvard and Cambridge your many years at Yale the oh how we long for those days right they would look at you and what you've become and say well this kind of education is going to take my children and make them different from me and I don't want that so how do you how do you how do you suggest the the value of Cosmopolitan education and light and education whatever II want to call it to people who are scared of the possibilities of what the downstream effects might be I think you have to take the condescension out of it it's the thing I think that we have allowed education to become an identity almost we've allowed it to be something that some people get a lot of access to and that a certain kind of person gets and a certain kind of person doesn't get and we have I think we do have a situation where in a lot of cases we have allowed our education to putrefy into arrogance and education should change you it should absolutely change you and it's a it's a huge risk and I think most parents if even if they knew it might cause some change to their kid but it's also going to open up a world for them would choose education even even rural people but I think when you add that content contempt into it that's when it becomes a different animal and I don't necessarily blame them for feeling like they don't want their kids to go off and become contemptuous of them so I think part of that has to do with the way that we conceive of education which I think in some ways is just wrongheaded I think I don't think education is so much a state of certainty as it is a process of inquiry and I think an educated person is I don't think it's someone who can recite an army of facts and knows a lot of things I think it's probably someone who has some flexibility of mind who's willing to examine their own prejudice who has acquired a depth of understanding that allows them to see the world for another point of view and I know it's a radical thing to say but I kind of I kind of suspect that education maybe is less about knowing more than someone and maybe more about knowing someone like really knowing them who is not like you in the process of your education what was the most surprising thing you learned about the world late I didn't learn about the Holocaust was a bit of a shake that was I was 17 it was one my first classes and that was like yeah Thursday morning Wednesday night I lived in a world where there was no Holocaust and then Thursday afternoon there had been and that was a shift I think strange as it is to say I think the civil rights movement was maybe I didn't know I knew about slavery but I'd learned this very weird version of it what was the weird version there was a history book that my dad had on the Mount on the mantle that I'd read that basically said slavery was this really difficult ownerís terrible institution for the slave owners a bummer and I read that and I'm ashamed to say I was just like okay and it really wasn't until I got to I got to BYU and we had the slavery section we had a week or two on slavery and I suddenly was like this is not what I thought it was so that's shifted and then a couple weeks later I turned up to class and we were talking about this thing called the Civil Rights which IDs civil rights movement I had never heard of and the professor puts a puts a picture up and it's it's a Rosa Parks can your fingerprint taken that famous image and he says to us all that she was arrested for taking a seat on a bus and I knew nothing about what he was talking about so I just assumed that he meant that she was being arrested for stealing the seat is safe they're a really unfortunate I'll jump missing understand is there some unfortunate misunderstanding from take a seat verses to take the sea so it just never would have occurred to me but in the in the recent history of my country you know and the living memory of my mother who to me seems young that there but an American could be arrested for sitting down on a bus like I thought my interpretation just made a lot more sense actually we're gonna go to questions and we have mics I think yeah and we're gonna do questions in a minute but let me ask you one more thing I think all of your devoted readers here want to know how your life has changed because of this immense success over the past year it's probably been a little bit of an out-of-body experience oh you don't to say something about that yeah yeah you just explained to me what I know you've explained to me before how weird it is super weird I don't know I mean I think that I did a year long book tour which is I would never do that again ever it's that's a that's a promise you might not want to me it's a promise it is a promise they'd sign that implies that's the worst part of the book tour um right now I don't know I mean I think I experienced for awhile just a loss of control we'd made commitments and I didn't feel like I could go back on them but I was just emotionally not in a place where I could do them either and I felt caught and either we cancelled some events and I actually got some nasty mail from people who were upset that I'd cancelled it and then I told really guilty and so I think it was a kind of loss of control or feeling like I was owned by other people and I had to do things because I said I would do them but I didn't know like that it was gonna be really hard and he was really hard going around talking about all the bad things that have happened to you for a year he's like a full row it's not ideal but then I also got a lot out of it in the sense that I remembered how alone I'd felt when I was becoming a strange to my parents and I remembered how badly I wanted to see someone talking about it and just tell me what their experience was I felt like I was the only person that had ever happened to and so I was also getting something from the event so I would it meant something to me to be able to be that person but it was just really really draining and so I finally just stopped traveling pretty much or really really cut back on it and I've been taking a gap year for the last Maties I don't know six months or something and and I kind of live in a slightly Hermitage way in as much as you can on the Upper West Side and it's and it's really lovely and it's kind of a nice thing as I go to events and I can engage with it but most of the time I would say I forget that I have written this book it's just not a big part of my life until I actually go somewhere where people want to talk to me about it and then but you know I pretty much hang out with all my friends and they're bored of it so they're over it so you know hmm why don't I why don't we take some questions I just raise your hand and there's someone right here who's very enthusiastic so let's do right here they just wait for the mic to come down doesn't work oh it does okay so you got a little bit in your book you mentioned a lot about like the lady in the mountains for the cover is that what like the pencil represents a great here is that what it's supposed to be I don't know it's a good question um I haven't thought of it that way but I like that it could be thought of that way I like that image a lot because I have a quote at the beginning in the book from Dewey where he says that education is is not meant to fit you for a future life it's it's meant to be life itself so the experience and the process and the goal of Education are all supposed to be the same thing and I I liked this image because the pencil is obviously a trope of Education but then I liked the idea that the pencil was also the mountain and I think the image on it is supposed to be me but I like the idea of it being the Indian princess more so I like your interpretation more than mine I liked that it was a dual image and that it was it was kind of saying yeah the story of my life and the story of Education is the same thing and I think it is for all of us and sometimes when we talk about education because we have a crisis of jobs and technology and globalization and there's all this pressure on the education system to essentially be job training and fit people to do jobs which is you know a good goal to but I think sometimes we forget that education is also meant to be about life and the way that you live your life and it's meant to fit people to live a richer fuller life that's really what it ought to do and making people employable is a wonderful side effect of that hi thank you for this awesome conversation I loved your book and your story I feel like many people grow up feeling different for a variety of different reasons and your story obviously was a more unusual and extreme version of that of the experience of sort of integrating into mainstream society of whatever that means once you were in school and anyway I just hoped you might talk a little bit about that sort of integration of identity if that is a process if it's happening I also am interested in its impact on your mental health which you wrote about so beautifully in the book and just any comments you have about that journey as well yeah um I'm interviewing Laurie Gottlieb I think later this afternoon not tomorrow afternoon and she has a wonderful line in her book where she talks about the need that we all have to let go of certain narratives about ourselves so that we can live our lives and not live the stories that we're telling ourselves about our lives and I think I think for me that's a lot of the book is about that it's trying to find that balance between who you are because you're given an identity when you're born and other people tell you who you are and that's just childhood and then at a certain point I think part of what it means to grow up is trying to define yourself both in connection with that and also in distinction to that and for some people that's a rough journey maybe because people in their lives won't allow them to change or or for various reasons so I I think I do think you're right I think a lot of people struggle with that and in a whole bunch of different ways and I think in some ways the facts of my upbringing are extreme but I I know a lot of people who had difficult family situations and I don't necessarily feel like well you're you're you're a five on a scale and I'm like I don't think it works like that I think it can be incredibly intense no matter what your situation is so one of the things I wanted to try to write about in the book at least is not that you should discount the narratives other people give you entirely but you don't necessarily have to take them at face value and you don't have to believe what someone else says about you even if it's someone that you love it'll come there guys hi I was fascinated by your changing and evolving and becoming the woman you are now from the girl that you grew up as in Idaho but I wonder what values and lessons and ideas you grew up with do you retain today good question um my parents I think had a they were devoted to hard work that's for sure I think they definitely taught us how to work and I'm grateful for that I think that the idea of Education which is that you're responsible for your own education my dad had this thing that he said a lot which is that you can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you which I do believe I do think something that you want to learn you're going to learn so much better than something someone else tells you that you have to learn and just a fundamental belief that I can teach myself things I'm really glad that I grew up with that other values I don't know I mean I grew up I grew up Mormon there's a lot of things I think I've taken from Mormonism that really inform me I think I'm no longer religious I don't I don't have that specific set of beliefs but I think we're moving into a strange age I think where science and technology are trying to tell us like what a person is but I think that we have an intuitive sense at least I hope we do that we don't really have an answer to that question yet like we want to talk about people like they're essentially responses to stimuli but I think a lot of us have a sense that that's not the whole story and that there's something else there and my worry is if as we're as we're rejecting this language of religion one of the great things that religion did give us is that language of a soul and a belief that everybody has divine value because they're children of God and I haven't seeing a scientific argument that too many replaces that but I see a tendency to devalue human beings I think a little bit I think I especially see it in the political climate right what what reason do we have to value someone that we think is prejudiced in some unforgivable way do we have a reason to value them and I find that for me that religious upbringing just comes back to me and I have to believe in it because I used to be that person I used to be that person who had no value because I thought the wrong things the sexist things the racist things the homophobic things I thought all of them and it was only because people decided that I had value despite the ideas I had that they got to me and changed my mind so I think I think that fundamental belief in in human value that even if it's not a parent it's something I really hope I keep do you ever still feel Mormon you cut off my applause [Applause] other was gonna be about you anymore I do I feel Mormon I don't feel Mormon when I talked to other Mormons because they are Mormon and they're doing warming things and thinking Mormon things and I'm aware that I don't do that anymore and I know that in their eyes I'm super not so I just suddenly I know I'm not but when I talk to people who aren't like when I'm talking to you yeah I feel superwoman that's because I'm super Jew you know so it's not working it's all working it's working there was a question over here and then I just want to make sure is there somebody over I just keep an eye on that side I think that you absolutely define Martin bubas famous expression about your unique and all the we're each unique in all the world and you certainly are and I enjoyed your book but I'm not gonna waste time on that what I want to ask you is what I'd like to ask you is has your unique experience in any way affected other rural young women where you live or throughout the country have you inspired people to be able to do what you did or do you think it's gone on deaf ears so to speak I hope so I mean I don't know I wanted to write the book I wrote it I wanted it to be easy to read you know hey everyone what you want to write in the literary ways everyone wants to be taken seriously as a writer but whenever I had to make a choice between a complicated literary sentence and a simple less literary sentence I always went with the other one because I wanted it to be something people could understand and I said this to my publisher the whole way through I don't want anything about this book to to make it so a 15 year old girl in Idaho couldn't get through it whether that's being super long or having complicated writing we're just we're not gonna do anything that would make it so I hope so I don't have any data for that but I hope that kind of what you were saying about what we think education is this more a leader ideological process I wanted to show not just rural kids but all kinds of kids education isn't any one thing it's you can do with these ideas anything that you want to do with them I went to Cambridge and my first exposure to feminism was a form of feminism that just terrified me and I didn't get it at all and I ran away and read John Stuart Mill and that was the kind of feminism that I liked and I liked it because it was just a total absence of anything he just said we have no idea what women are it's a complete mystery and I read that and thought perfect like this is the feminism for me we don't know where women are if anyone tries to tell you that they know what you are they don't and that I'm innocent hurry and so I think I want to try to book about education that said it's it's not ideological it's not about a particular class or for a particular race or a particular group of people it can be anything and what you do with these ideas is entirely up to you it is your education it's not anybody else's so I hope so and I hope that they would find a story that represents them that they recognize themselves and I don't think that the rural us is represented often enough in media so I hope so but I don't know thank you your book is very powerful and I think it should become an American institution for 15 year-old boys and girls to read it and I wonder how you view that for your future it's strange to be told that you should be an institution I don't know the book is its own thing now I don't there was a time that it was mine and now it doesn't feel particularly like it's mine anymore and like I said people come up to me and have totally different interpretations of it and completely different ideas about what they think it means and I knew that that might happen when I wrote it and that was kind of the goal so I'm I'm okay with it I don't know how okay I am with being chained to it for the rest of my life but I'm okay with it going off and doing its own thing yeah that's fine they can just go out its own little life I'll watch sure yeah down here I'm wondering if music is still a big part of your life and if you would be willing to sing a little something yes it is yeah but mostly just for fun I just sing for fun and I can sing something but let's do one more question cuz it's very awkward to sing and then be like next big burst into song and then so we'll do it at the very end if you really there's a question over there wow that's really brave of you by the way well singing I am more comfortable with and speaking actually so we'll do one more question here and then we're gonna get a performance well since we're all other things other than just the book dr. music when I rich book one of the things that really got to me was how physically active you were I mean scrapping metal and climbing up on those big trucks and everything as a young girl this was really hard physical work and I wondered now that you become more of an academic what do you do to keep fit quick answer to that would be I had a rude awakening when I went to college because I was consuming like six seven thousand calories a day and that was fine and then it wasn't and one day I walked in I was eating an entire bag of Doritos and my roommate said to me do you know how many calories in that and I looked at it and it was a lot and I said that's fine you're allowed like 6,000 a day right and she said no super not and so I gained like 30 pounds really quickly and then realized that if you're not roofing all day you can't eat like 12 Snickers bars like it's just it's just a bummer so no I do i I mind I'm a Jimmer I I go to the gym and I i bribe myself to do it I'm a big fan of the Pavlovian method where I love this American life and I'm only allowed to listen to to the gem like I'm just only allowed it so I just associate the gym with like the dulcet tones of Ira Glass to me the two are completely inseparable and if a new episode comes out and I have a friend who produces for them she'll text me there's just great episode and I read it I can't wait the gym so that's how I do it it's bribery okay we haven't run out of questions time questions all right do you want dicing I think you should sing now I'm gonna sing a Worman him cuz with me that's what you get I think it's weird to sing pop songs like a fella I don't know any anyway alright I'm looking over here ho Lord my God when I in awesome wonder consider all the world's thy hands have made I see the stars I hear the Rolling Thunder thy power [Music] the universe displayed then sings my soul my Savior God to thee How Great Thou art How Great Thou then sings my soul [Music] my Savior God to thee How Great Thou O great [Applause]

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 364,396

Rating: 4.8512764 out of 5

Keywords: Jeffrey Goldberg, Tara Westover, Aspen Ideas Festival

Id: x2XWYT-t47E

Length: 47min 23sec (2843 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019