>> i practice that advice as well. >> to watch the rest of this conversation visit our website, booktv.org and search for jeffrey rosen or ruth bader ginsburg to find this program and all of their other c-span appearances. .. [inaudible conversations] please welcome tara westover. [applause]. >> hello there. guess who i am. this is tara westover and if i have to give you an introduction about tara westover you need to get out of the hole that you had been living in for a while. her book has just celebrated the hundredth week on the new york times bestseller list. it is at number one. ahead of michelle malcolm. that's very cool. i am assuming that a lot of people are familiar with the narrative and that is why you are so interested. i would still go through some of her story because it's so gripping. and it starts in idaho and actually to me it is such a beautiful setting there must be a lot of beautiful memories that you still have of that. >> it was a beautiful mountain that i grew up on. i still have a really strong memories of being on the mountain. i think it is an incredible the kids get to play in the playground. there is a lot of wonderful things that can happen on a mountain like that. we were the original free range kids. there was a lot of really wonderful things about it. then there were some difficult things also. the setting and the scenery not even nature brought -- nature walks are just there all the time. one of the things when i would come back from college. i would just be rapturous about how wonderful everything was. it is a field. we have to take a picture of this. your mother was an herbalist. we grew a lot of the food that we ate we have animals that we raised. mostly normal once. we have goats, and pigs. so normal animals is like a poodle. we never have a poodle. norma -- normal farm animals. we have a lot of goats. we were goat people. what i think of as normal animals. >> there are a lot of people around. we did not go to school they have a different philosophy on a lot of things. they were opposed to a lot of things. my dad got a little bit more radical as he got older. my first three siblings went to school and born in hospitals as my dad got older he got a little bit more radical. my fourth brother after that no birth certificates or anything like that. no medical records. nothing. i got my birth certificate when i was nine. you're like lucky you didn't look like me. no documentation, that is a problem. >> lucky for many reasons that you don't look like me. >> are you still reading? there is one reference of going to the carnegie library. reading was important to my parents. we all learned how to read. one of my brothers thought i was dumb. i learned how to read it. it was important to my parents that you could read c could read the bible into the book of mormon. reading was really important. the rest of education was a little bit more peace now. sometimes working to get serious about the schooling this year's. they needed to have a tenure supply of food to see whatever catastrophe was going to come at the end of time. >> then you have to be able to protect the food. it gets to be kind of involved in planning. >> ten years of food is a lot of food. >> you mentioned that your father involved in his way of thinking where he went more to the french was an event that changed the way he was viewing the world or was it just a progression. >> it is hard to say. there were definitely events that seem to play into it. that hit my family in a pretty specific way. for my dad for many years before that was already pretty frightened of the federal government. with production --dash -- pretty radical ideas about government and school. i think ruby ridge for him really solidify that because that is a story of the federal government surrounding the family. and killing several members of the family. they were in idaho and they were homeschoolers like my family. >> for my dad i think that really solidified in his mind a lot of the fears that he was worried about i think that have a pretty intense effect. i don't think anybody went to school after the ruby ridge incident. after that nobody went to any school. i think he is the third oldest in the family. he felt the need to break free of that environment. he was allowed to go to one year of high school. he was just kind of a freak. in a good way. but he went to a year of high school and he loved it. he times of trigonometry. and then he taught himself algebra and then he decided he would teach himself calculus. you can't teach yourself calculus and she just laughed. he taught himself calculus. and then one day took the act. he got almost a perfect score and just announced she was he was going to college. i did not even know what that was. at the guy was probably eight. then he just kind of left. >> the book is dedicated to tyler. you credit him with also introducing you to music which i think you said was one of the main source of the source. i was pretty happy with the mountain. i subscribed to my father's world view. it made sense to me. you get told things. and so i subscribed to my dad's way of looking at the world and had no intention of ever leaving the mountain. and then tyler played for me some opera and some of that mormon tabernacle choir. i was just really arrested by it i don't know what this is. no one is known how to sing like this. i said to tyler where do you go to learn this. and he said you go to college. i said fine, i'll do that. i ended up saying how do i get to college. you teach yourself math is not that hard, don't worry. so i tried it because he was like acting as if it was a very normal thing to do i did not teach myself calculus i barely managed to teach myself enough algebra to scrape through that. i woke up early to try to learn algebra. i taught myself algebra because i liked to sing. it was the motivation for me. i'm not sure what kind of lesson there is a net except that i think we should be a little thoughtful or we crush any type of passion. it was because i like to think that i went to college. i discovered philosophy and history and all of these wonderful things. and then i left that and went to cambridge. i came to this place here. you just don't know where these things are gonna take you but i think if you don't have that passion. it will probably take you nowhere. you have that chapter called apache women i have not read it in a while. it's really good. i would recommend it. she made the decision. your 15 or 16. you got the score in the act that get you into byu. and you are pretty set. there is one expert -- excerpt here that you haven't read recently. your father comes into your room at night. i have prayed to the lord about your decision and he's called me to testify he is displeased that you are casting away his blessing to report the knowledge. and as a father you had decided not to go to college. i very much described my dad's world view. mostly i just subscribed to it. even once i did go i think i did have to believe that i shouldn't know or there was something kind of wicked about the fact that i was going. i dad have a doctrine that we were taught we were a peculiar people. and we did not participate in all of the things that other people did. for me to go to college was a huge breach of that. i was of two minds for a really long time. it felt like a feeling that i didn't have enough faith or conviction to just stick out what this life was. i didn't feel like the right life for me. i think when you are a kid i was 17. i did not know how to reconcile those two things. to their way of life and their beliefs. i also something to myself. i want to see what i'm able to do. i really want to do this. i cannot reconcile those two obligations. at times she really encourages you. you are the one we thought you would get out of here. and not stay. it seems like she is pulling back from that. >> whenever i think about my mom i always think about there is two versions of her. there is my mother and then there is my father's wife. they are just not the same person. my mother is a really different person when my dad is there or she is acting on his behalf. she's a very different person. as i got older i felt like that person was less and less present. it was a little bit unpredictable. i can see what you are reaching for. you go to college and you are finding out that all of these things it's really different than that of your classmates. that is like one obstacle. even though in retrospect. it must be a little transition. it seemed to me like a shockingly worldly party school but i recognize now that says a lot more about me than it does about byu. it's more or less a mormon combat. men and women live in different buildings. and there is a curfew that is 12:00 at night. you can only lit be in the living room. you have to go to the bathroom in the apartment across the street that women on. people were wearing tank tops and drinking mountain dew. that is a language. there is a lot of focus on the academic lifestyles. and the social. there is also a financial obstacles. the church subsidize a lot of it. you could actually escape through. i think it was $1,600. or something like that. it is unbelievable for the kind of education that it is. my rent was $110 a month. so you could do that. the only problem with doing it that way is that you would be inversely preoccupied with money. you can woke me up at 3:00 in the morning and shook me awake and said how much money is in your bank account i could've told you to the penny. i knew at any hour of the day. that takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth for a lack of a better term. i needed a root canal it's not obvious why it's such a good thing. i could not afford the root canal. it was like $1,400 i didn't have it. i ended up going in and talking to a bishop. i would not take it. then he tried it give me money from his own bank account which i wouldn't take. and then after weeks and weeks convinced me to apply for a grant which is a whole other complicated thing for me to do. eventually i got this check for four grant. i just stared at it. i actually called the woman and said i don't need all of it can you take some of it back. she thought i have lost my mind. she's like i don't had time for whatever this is. it's your problem. i paid for it all to get fixed. and i have a thousand dollars left over. it was the first time i had have anything like that. i guess is the first time i experienced what i think of to be the most powerful thing about money. if you have a lot of money and in your still thinking about money all the time you're probably doing it wrong. that is freeing you to finally be a student to learn. i could focus on things exactly how much money i have. i could stop thinking about all of that stuff. one of the classes i took was psych 101. i would take psychology class. i enrolled in psych 101 which is probably every parent's nightmare. that their kid will take psych 101 and then come home and psychoanalyze them. i have no concept of mental illness until i have that class. when they were going through the cycles. in paranoid asia. he is explaining at all. and he has a power point and he is moving. i just wrote in my notes this is my dad. he is describing dad. that's when they started talking about ruby ridge and the version of the story that was slightly different than what i had grown up with. i don't know if my dad is bipolar. it was just a whole new lens through which i could look and understand what have happened other explanations for why we weren't allowed to go to school or why we have so many injuries was never something that was clear to me. there was a lot of questions that i have. the answers i have were tough. you are in the state of mind where you have the money and freedom to learn more. you had been mocha to the fact that most of the things weren't true. is that an advantage that you assumed you know nothing in that way. a lot of high school students still believe in things that they were taught. you describe letting go of everything assuming everything was different. does it create a hunger hunger and thirst for more. maybe there is a slight hunger that came out of it. hunger is a flattering way to say it. they take a little far. it is an insatiable hunger. there were a lot of things i didn't know. i thought i knew things. i was not aware of my own ignorance until i became aware of it when i learned about the civil rights movement and that was the first time that i thought oh crap i don't know anything. the stuff i do know is wrong. i have never heard of it. i had grown up hearing about slavery but there was a really weird version of that. it's really not good. and then i have attended the class and then we did a section on slavery and i have seen images from the time or read accounts and we have seen a sketch of a slave auction. this is not what i imagine. it fit broadly within the story that he told. i came back into class. and that he was talking about that thing called civil rights movement and i have no idea what it was. she has been arrested for taking a seat on the bus. i thought she have been stealing the bus seat. it's an unfortunate misunderstanding. how did she get it loose. i grew up in the junkyard. i do decent idea what would be involved in getting the busty out. because we have done it before and i said that's not really a casual thing. you ended up graduating in the top students in history. they voted me on something i don't think i was the top gpa. i think i was something i can't remember what it was. it is a pretty big honor. it seems like your parents are proud of this and your father is saying it looks like the homeschooling paid off. he liked that way of telling it. and then you go to cambridge and you are exposed to more ideas and then you write about isaiah berlin. i don't think we need to go into all of that. it seems like at cambridge you realize you have a narrative it's interesting to other people. is that when you kind of start talking about your childhood i guess a little bit towards the end. i was pretty secretive about the whole thing. when the book came out i have good friends of mine call me and say wait, what. i just never talk to any of them about any of it. they knew i was homeschooled but i have a very clean safe version of that that i told. the few times i have told somebody you don't like being the outsider in that way. you don't like being the one person that doesn't know anything or what is going on. doesn't understand it is not always pleasant. i kept to myself. a few professors said i should write about this, what is the point of it. i did not have a sense of what the point was. and then i went through this tremendously difficult process. they were continuing to be more radical. i was becoming a little bit more main stream. after i went through that process that's when i started thinking maybe there was a reason to write it. i know for don't know for sure if there is. i will experiment. the main reason to write is just to put a put the story out. the main reason to write is just a put the story out. there is the reason that you are writing. i had thought that there might be a reason to write. i will write about these really important things i've learned about i thought somehow i could write an entire book about education and thought i would not had to mention my family. i had convinced myself that that was possible. there's so much about your story and people are fascinated with your journey i read this book when it first came out. i read it again when my men's book club chose it again. again. after you read it the first time and you just flip through the pages. the next two times i read it i was really moved by the language and i wondered if you could just read two paragraphs. with your writing voice. there are to two here that i had marked. >> he picked landscape passages for you. this is about idaho. the hell is paved with wild wheat. if they are soloist the wheat field is a quart of ballet. each stem following all the rest in movement a million ballerinas bending one after another. the shape of that dent lasts only a moment and is as close as anyone gets to seen wind. there is a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain a perception of privacy and isolation. even of dominion. in the vast space you can sail sale unaccompanied for hours. it is a tranquility born of sheer admin city. it renders the merely human of no consequence. >> thank you. [applause]. .. .. you must have had somer and -- >> the bible and the bible has linguistically and poetly and every -- narratively, not every single word is gold but there's some incredibly beautiful writing in the bible. so had grope up with that and ambiguity story-telling and grown up with that kind of literary biblical tradition that it wasn't as though language was completely foreign to me of it was foreign that i would ever write it was incredibly foreign and strange. >> it's a different writing than academic writing which what you did at came rage. >> almost diametrically opposed to each other. i think what it takes to write a good academic wall. you want to say everything in the most direct way possible and be totally plain, and i think that's kind of the kiss of death in story-telling actually. if you -- you actually want to build in a little bit more complexity. you want to let people see the scene and come to their own conclusions. that's kind of the great risk i think of story-telling specially but your own write. i if you write a book but your life but experience shall in the sense you're putting people in the scene, they're going to have that experience. it's as if it happened to them and then they might come to a different conclusion than you too about your life and that's a strange kind of gamble to take, but i think better than this, here i'm going to tell you about this person and here's what happened and what her dilemma and is what it means. people might process that but i don't think they'll think through it and kind of feel through it and come to a conclusion that is really, really going to move them or stay with them. they have to kind of experience it. so, i did to write the book, it's not an essay or an argument, just a story. and everybody can go through that story and they can come up with a whole -- i get all kinds of people come up to me at my book events and have all kinds of different takeways from the story. and some people say i'm so glad that i just know that your reconciliation with your and your parenting right around the corner and some people say i'm so glad to know you'll never see those people again. and one right after the other. and in both case is just kind of smile and say, thank you, because ill know it has nothing to do with me. it's got everything to do with them and what they need to hear or think but or the puzzles they're wrestling with in their own lives and that's the point of the story. that's exactly what it should be. >> but you did write it for yourself in some sense. no? >> i think i was trying to make sense of it. i think i was trying to figure out fundamentally -- trying to figure out if i was a good person. i wasn't sure i was. i had done something in my own mind that was unthinkable, which is i had written to my parents and said i love you but i needed to be the case we don't talk or see each other very much. i just need a break. and there's a word for that. it's called estrangement. i couldn't call it that at the time. i just need space. and i felt terrible for doing that. i felt like it was the ultimate inexcusable thing. just not allowed to do that. if you do that it's because you're a terrible person. i really believed that. and yet i didn't have any other choice, at least i couldn't see one. i'd been trying to have peaceful relationship with my family for as long as i could remember and just wasn't happening for me. so, i think a lot of the reason i wrote the book was to answer that question. >> did it answer it. >> -- it was okay i did the. >> did you get some resolution with that. >> i think it helped me see the truth of it, which i think sometimes the choices we make, that we punish ourselves most for are the choices we really didn't have any choice at all, and that is i think writing it out and kind of i realized there really wasn't another path here. this was the path. there was just the one path. and it helped me make peace with where i end up. realizing it's not where i would have chosen to end up. never would have wanted that ending, but it was probably the best end and it was an ending i could live with, and that i could still love my parents. it's not like i stopped loving them. it was just the case that this was the form that love had to take for a while. >> sometimes you have a period where you write or fig things out and it's nice you have a narrative that is helpful. and then you kind of put it town and you move on with things. but we're not letting you move on. we're kind of like dragging you out and making you talk about this over and over for 100 weeks. >> that is true. thanks. [laughter] >> it's fine. >> it was his idea. >> i a friends prove mine wrote a beautiful book but what happened to her family and i asked her, was writing your book -- really therapeutic and she said, you know, writing a book is terribly therapeutic, publishing a book is not. that was true. >> you in your family of nine, seven of you and then your parents, you have four that have different names. you have contacted everybody and said is it okay if i wrote this book and your your name or if your eexchanged you don't use their name. was there ever a consideration -- you're still tara westover and it's easy to figure out who your parents are. >> my understanding is with memoir that's tricky. i think you can publish it as a novel, which i really did think about. i thought just saying it's a novel. but then problems with calling your novel the first one is no one would have believed it. because it's too weird. actually, told one move i brothers up and said, i'm going to write about our family, a memoir. there's really long pause on the end of the line and he said, well, you won't have to make anything up. and so really i general lynn the thought if of if i write this as a novel no one will believe it. it's too weird. so that was the first reason. the second reason is a little more serious which is just when i went through that difficult process with my family, i think like a lot of other people would struggling with estrengthment or difficult families, what you feel is just kind of isolated from people and it feels leak you're the only person that's ever had this problem, and i remember thinking to myself, how could anybody think i'm a good person if they know my mother opportunity think i'm a good person? my parents at that time were saying i was possessed. they really believe i had left their faith and they thought the reason was that i was possessed and i jug thought, how can anybody ever trust me again given this reality. once i had a little does stance from that, it -- distance from that it seemed important if if was going to write the story and say this happened, that it needed to have happened to a real person and it needed to have happened to someone who would stand up and say, this happened to me, my story, and might be your story, might have elements 60 your story but happened to a real person and that persones me. just felt like the -- a lot of the point of doing that would be blunted if you couldn't -- if you were kind of fictional iowaing it and standing behind a fiction. so i decided to do what i could to protect privacy and give people as much space also could i but i thought i have to write under my own name. >> i think with fiction we characters often get two-dimensional and here you laid yourself open and you're successful showing come mex -- in the most complicated relationship with is with your brother sean you show so many things he does with you that are so loving and you talk about him breaking horses for you, saving your life on a runaway horse. your father tries to get you to work with this sheer. >> that was fun. >> osha would be all over that. and sean says, if you're going to make us do it i'm going to do it and not tara, and he really loved you and puts himself in harm residents way for you but yet is the source of a lot of your pain. >> something i wanted to try to describe for both people who have experienced that and haven't, win one taught disfunctional or abusive relationships we are so focused on the neglect testify. what we're describing may or may not be recognize able to people who are actually experiencing the relationships, and i remember when i was 16 i was at my grandmother's house and watched this hallmark movie, in't remember. it had a really disfunctional relationship in it, a violent relationship and i was driving home and really young and i was driving home and i therefrom was a moment i had this thought i wonder if my relationship whiff sean is pusssive? i was like, in -- abusive, in because that i goose because always wearing the wife beater shirt and always drunk. every scene he was in the was a caricature of a monster and that's what it looks like and that's not what sean is like. except for a tiny percentage of the time and then he absolutely is like that. think in my mind if someone is not lick that all the time, then it's fine. and i think it was something i wanted to try to capture for people is part of what makes those relationships so compelling and what makes so it hard to leave, is that the love is real, that often genuinely loving, compelling people, who need help or whatever, wonderful at some point you have to kind of ask the hard question, can i actually help the person. if the answer is, no, how do i take care of myself? i felt like i had to write about the relationship the way i experienced it, which was not completely white or black. made it very difficult no walk away from. >> you one of the few times you talk but your father being consistently proud of you is when you are start singing in public and there's one line, it is ironic and jew explain the things he is doing and say he wanted my voice to be heard, and so obviously your voice is heard now. >> he may nod have hat that in mind. >> i wonder if you would let us hear the voice that your father had in mind and sing something for us. >> yeah. i can do that. always sing a hymn. i hope plow like hymns. i have to remember -- i haven't sung it in a while. okay. i got it. ♪ oh, lord, my god ♪ when i in awesome wonder ♪ come sit along the world ♪ thy hands have made ♪ i see the stars ♪ i hear the rolling thunder ♪ i throughout the universe ♪ displayed ♪ then sings my ♪ by savior god to thee ♪ how great thou art ♪ how great thou art ♪ and since my soul ♪ my save -- save savior god to thee ♪ how great thou art ♪ how great thou art [applause] >> thank you very much. >> that was wonderful. >> that was really fun. thank you. i don't know if we have time to spare. [inaudible conversations] >> please welcome james carville, senator jeff flick, karl rove, and bret stephens.