For those that have the catastrophe that follow. Hello there. Guess who i am. [laughter] if i have to give you an introduction about Tara Westover you need to get out of the hole you have been living in for a while. [laughter] her book has just celebrated 100 consecutive week on the New York Times bestseller list. It is number one. [applause] Michelle Malcolm milken is down there. Im assuming that a lot of people are familiar with the narrative and thats why you are still here at the last lecture on the second day but we thought we would go through some of her story because its so gripping and it starts in idaho and actually it is such a beautiful setting and a lot of beautiful memories that you still have. Yes. It was a Beautiful Mountain that i grew up on but i still have fond memories to be on the mountain and playing on the mountain. It is incredible we had this entire farm a lot of wonderful things that could happen i guess i was the original free range kid. [laughter] there was a lot of wonderful things about it. Then there were some difficult things but the setting, the scenery. Is not even nature works nature walks. You are just they are constantly you are in it. And i would be back from college i would be back she was used to it. Its a field. Did say we have to take a picture of this and she would roll her eyes. Your mother was an herbalist. Yes. We grew what we ate we had animals that he raised so we were pretty involved. We had normal animals goats and pigs. This is Rancho Mirage that is a poodle. [laughter] we never had a poodle. [laughter] that never happened. Normal farm animals chickens and pigs we had a lot of goats. We were goat people. [laughter] what i think of as normal animals. You are the youngest of seven so there are a lot of people around. Yes we didnt go to school they had a different philosophy so they were opposed to a lot of things we take for granted. Doctors and hospitals they would not like you. [laughter] my dad got more radical as he got older so my first three siblings went to school. They were born and hospitals and then they got more radical they pulled kids out of school and then after that with me then everyone was born at home in my fourth brother after that no birth certificates. No medical records or nothing. I got my birth certificate when i was nine. No documentation is a problem. [laughter] lucky for many reasons you dont live like me. [laughter] or look like me. [laughter] but you are still reading . I think there was one reference going to the carnegie library. There was one library in town we would go occasionally i was taught how to read by my older brother im sure it was how fast i can learn one thought i was dumb that i could not learn how to read. At age four. Yes we can all read it was importance to read the bible the book of mormon we were very religious so reading was very important and then the education was more piecemeal and haphazard some years my mom would say were going to get serious this year about the schooling and then would give demands to herbalism or the farm and my parents were very devoted so that they need to have a ten year supply of food for whatever catastrophe or the end of time. You are the ones that have food. You have to protect the food for people who dont have it so it is involved with that kind of planning so ten years of food is a lot of food thats not a little bit of food. For nine people. Now you mention your father was involved evolved in his way of thinking or that was more toward the fringe . Did something happen that change the way he was viewing the world or just a progression . Its hard to say there are events that seem to play into it and intensify i write about ruby ridge is what i remember that hit my family a specific way i think for my dad many years before that was already frightened of the federal government and developing radical ideas around government and doctors in school i think ruby ridge solidified that for him because the federal government surrounding a family and killing several members. They were in idaho and they were homeschool like my family. So for my dad that solidified a lot of the fears of what he was worried about. So that had an intense effect effect couple of my siblings went to school before or after that but nobody went to school. But the third oldest he felt the need to break free of that environment. He went to one year of high school and was kind of a freak in a good way. [laughter] he went through high school he liked it he taught himself trigonometry and algebra and decided he would teach himself calculus he went to the high school and said give me a calculus book and the calculus teacher just laughed and said you cant teach yourself. He said give me a book and then one day he took the sata thank you got a perfect score i think i was eight so i thought college was an evil terrible thing and then he left. The book is actually dedicated to him. You credit him with introducing you to music which was one of the main sources of inspiration to see something greater outside your world. I was happy growing up on the mountain that was a wonderful thing i didnt subscribe to my fathers worldview so i very much subscribed to my dads way of looking at the world i had no intention of ever leaving. But then tyler played for me some opera. And i was arrested by it but i thought i dont know what this is but no one is born knowing how to sing like this you have to go somewhere and they teach you how. So i said where do you go to learn this he said you go to college i said okay i will do that. So had you get to college . So i did not teach myself calculus i barely managed to teach myself some algebra. But but it is still true maybe we should be a little thoughtful because you just dont know where that will take them. And then to discover philosophy and history. And then i wrote a book and then i came here. But then you have that chapter called apache woman. Its really good per guy would recommend a. [laughter] i heard it is good. So you are being modest but you have the score on the sat that got you into byu and you are set that you have read recently but tara i have prayed to the lord about your decision and he is displeased that you are casting away his blessings that his wrath will come upon you. So you decided not to go. I very much subscribed to my dads worldview. That that i still believed i shouldnt go if there was something wicked about the fact i was going because we didnt participate and other people did in Public School was a big part of that. So college was a huge breach of that and i was of the mind that it felt like a personal failing to stick out this life but it didnt feel like the right life for me. And when you are a kid i guess i was 17 but i didnt know how to reconcile those feelings required something to my parents and loyalty and their way of life and belief but i felt like i owed them that and i also felt like i owed something to myself. That i should explore this i love to sing and i want to explore what im able to do. There was no way to do it. This is so interesting because the time your mother encourages you and says you are the one that i thought would get out of here you need to go and not stay. Then other time she says she pulls back from that. When i think of my mom there are two versions. There is my mother and then my fathers wife. They are just not the same person. My mother is a really different person when my dad is out of their or she acts on his behalf. When i was younger i felt more of her as my mother and as i got older i think of her that that person was less and less presen present. So we go to college and you find out it is different from that of your classmates. But is not like berkeley. You seem like a shock. Because more or less its a mormon convent. [laughter] more or less. [laughter] men and women live in different buildings and a curfew at 12 00 oclock if you visit a guys apartment you can only be in the living room. You cannot even go into the bathroom. To go into a bathroom across the street that women owned. By thought it was the most terrifying. [laughter] and they were drinking mountain dew. [laughter] i thought i was surrounded by gentiles. But the academics is not what you had been taught. But there is also financial obstacles. Luckily byu was not expensive the church subsidized a lot of it. So you could scrape through. Tuition at my time was 1600. Which is unbelievable for the kind of education it is. My rent i will never forget 110 a month. So you could do that. You could work a couple jobs and work in the summer and do that but then youd be constantly and endlessly preoccupied with money. You can evoke me up at 3 00 oclock in the morning and shook me awake how much in your bank account and i couldve told you to the penny. 26. 57 per guy new at any hour how much money i had. I knew all of that. And that takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth for lack of a better term. Thing and focused on every day was money. Then the best thing that happened to me that i needed a root canal. Because i cannot afford it i didnt have the money for it was 1400. I talked to the bishop he tried to give me the churches money but i was raised with the idea of independence so i wouldnt take it. After weeks and weeks convinced me to apply for the pell grant which was complicated because the government i thought it was a luminosity so i called the woman and said i dont need all this takes some of it back. [laughter] she thought i was prank calling her. She thought others are not getting enough for us to get more like i dont have time for this. So i paid all may rent for the semester and had several thousand dollars left over. This is the first time i had anything like that. That was the first time i experienced what i now think of the most powerful thing about money. And if you have a lot of money in the net frees you to be a student to learn. Yes but i can actually take classes and focus on things. That is how much money i had our how many hours i had to work i stopped thinking about all that. I took psychology one oh one i did not need i thought that would be interesting. So i enrolled which i actually think is probably every parents nightmare. [laughter] and then they come home and psychoanalyze them which is exactly what happened. Had i had no concept of Mental Illness until i took the class. The professor started to lecture on bipolar and grandiosity and depression and paranoia delusions of grandeur and he has a powerpoint i just wrote in my notes that is my dad. He is describing dad. And so i dont know if my dad is bipolar because ironically one of the symptoms means that hell never see a doctor for it with that type of paranoia but there was a whole new lens like a look at my childhood and understand what had happened. Other explanations and why we had so many injuries that was never clear to me why we didnt go to the doctor. So those answers were tough. So to have the money and the freedom to know more so than and that is the advantage that you assume that you know nothing . But they still believe in the things they were taught and to know what to let go of but you just assume everything is different like its a clean slate maybe one maybe there is a hunger that came out of it thats a flattering way to describe it. I have a phd but not a high school diploma. May be overcompensating a littl little. The insatiable hunger. I dont know. Theres a lot of things i didnt know for i thought i knew things until i became aware of my own ignorance with the Civil Rights Movement and that was the first time that i thought crap i dont know anything that is wrong. Anything in general quick. I had never heard of it a grew up hearing about slavery it was a weird version of that not good. And i attended the class and we did a section on slavery and i had seen images from the time in those famous photos that you see from that time or those accounts or a sketch and it was clear to me so i thought when dad told us about it is not what i imagine but is still fit with the story that he told and then a few weeks went by became into class and now talking about the Civil Rights Movement and i didnt know what that was and says she was arrested for taking a seat on the bus i thought he meant she was arrested for stealing the bus seat. [laughter] which is a loan the unfortunate misunderstanding of take a seat so i was still trying to figure out how did she get it loose . [laughter] i grew up in the junkyard i had a decent idea what would be involved to get a bus seat out of the bus. Because we had done it before. [laughter] thats not a casual sunday afternoon activities. You got the other questions right because you graduate as a top student in history. Isnt that true . They voted me on something i dont think it was top student. I thought it was top history. I was something i didnt flunk out or anything to make then you go to cambridge that is equivalent to the Rhodes Scholarship because then you go to oxford and then to cambridge. Your parents are proud of this like we are the homeschooling. [laughter] and then you go to cambridge and you are exposed to more ideas and i think we have to go into all of that but at cambridge he realized you had a narrative that is interesting to other people is that when you Start Talking about your childhood . A little bit toward the end. I was still pretty secretive about the whole thing even when the book came out good friends called me and said what . Because i never talk to them about any of it. They knew i was homeschooled but i had a very clean version that i told some times at byu when i told somebody that you dont like being the outsider or the one person that doesnt know whats going on that doesnt know what the holocaust is is just not always pleasant so i kept it to myself a few professor said maybe you should write about this and i thought why whats the point . I didnt have a sense of what the point was that i went to this tremendously difficult process in my family they were becoming more radical i was becoming more mainstream so then i thought maybe i need to write then i would experiment. So then you want to put the story out so those in a similar situation. There is a reason and you are writing or you tell yourself you are writing i thought there might be a reason i thought i was writing about my education and the process of learning and somehow i could write about my education i write about my family. I dont know how i thought that but i convinced myself that was possible. There is so much about your story and people are fascinated with your journey so i read the book when it first came out and then our mens Book Club Read it in the residence of my hospital and then the first time you just find out whats going on. But then the next few times i read it i was moved by the language. If you could just read two paragraphs i would like to give the audience a sample of your writing voice these parts i have marked. He picked the landscape passages for you. That is everyones favorite. This is about idaho. The hell is paved with wild wheat the conifers and sagebrush the wheat field and one after the other the shape of the vent is only a moment and the closer you get to see the wind. There is a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on the mountain, perception of isolation in that vast space to be afloat on pine and brush and rock and with its magnitude which renders them of no consequence. [applause] thank you. So clearly you are writing this as a first language. So it is hard to imagine writing so beautifully but not coming to books until you are in college. I had the bible. The bible has linguistically and politically every other way, not every single word is gold but there is some incredibly beautiful writing in the bible. So i had grown up with that ambiguity of storytelling and with that biblical tradition that it wasnt completely foreign to me but maybe the way i would write it. But it is different than academic writing which you were doing. They are almost diametrically opposed. So what it takes to write academic to be direct and plain that is the death of storytelling. You want to build in more complexity and then to come to their own conclusions. If you write a book that you put people they would have this experience and then they might come to a different conclusion. And thats a gamble to take. Better than an essay and here is the dilemma. But i dont think they would come to a conclusion that would stay with them they have to experience that. So its just a story. Everybody can come up people come up to me at book events with all different kinds of takeaways some people say im so glad that the reconciliation with you and your parents is right around the corner some say im so glad youll never see those people again. [laughter] it in both cases i smile and say thank you because it has nothing to do with me it has everything to do with them and what they need to hear and think about and thats the point of the story. It should be that exactly what it should be. You did write for yourself in some sense . I was trying to make sense of it. I was trying to figure out fundamentally i have done something in my own mind that was unthinkable which i had written to my parents and said i love you but i needed to be the case we dont talk or see each other very much because i need a break. The word for that is called estrangement. I didnt know that at the time. Just that i needed space. And i felt terrible for doing that. I felt that youre just not allowed to do that for good if you do that you are a terrible person. But yet i had no other choice i was trying to have a peaceful relationship with my family for as long as i can remember. So just to answer the question is it okay that i did this it helps me to see the truth. Sometimes the choices that we make but that we had no choice at all that there really wasnt another path. This is the path. Did help to make peace to realize i never would have wanted that ending but it was an ending i can live with. That this is the form of had to take for a while. But we are not letting you move on. We keep dragging you out and talk about this over and over for 100 weeks. That is true. Thanks. [laughter] a good friend of mine wrote a beautiful book about it and i asked her right before it came out was was it therapeutic . She said writing a book is terribly their punic but publishing it is not. And that is true. In your family of nine you have for that have different names. And then to say and with that consideration its easy to figure out who your parents are did you consider publishing under another name . I did. That you could publish that as a novel which i really did think about just to say its a novel that then there are two problems the first that nobody would have believed it. It is too weird. I called one of my brothers and said i am going to write about our family as a memoir there was a really long pause on the other line and he said well you wont have to make anything up. [laughter] so i genuinely thought if i write this as a novel nobody will believe it. It is too weird for quite cant do that but the second reason is a little more serious just that when i went to that process like a lot of other people who are struggling with estrangement we really feel isolated from people and it feels like youre the only person that ever had this problem. I remember thinking to myself how will they think im a good person if they know my mother doesnt think im a good person. Because my parents that i was possessed. Left their faith and the reason was i was possessed. So i just thought how could anybody trust me again given this reality . And then we had some distance for that. That if we write the story and say this happened that needs to happen to somebody who would stand up to say this is my story. And then the point of doing that and then to fictionalize that and standing behind the fiction. I was excited to do what i could to protect privacy and give them as much space as i could and then to write it under my own name. And then to labor so hard it with those complicated relationships with your brother sean. There were so many things that he does with you that are so loving. You talk about him breaking horses for you, saving your life at great risk to himself. Your father tried to work with the sheer, osha would be all over that. That was fun. He said if you are going to make us do it then i will do it and not you. So he loves you and puts himself in harms way but yet also the source of a lot of your pain. What i wanted to describe for people that have experience that and those that havent. Sometime talk about dysfunctional or abusive relationships we are so focused on the negative but what we are describing is not recognizable to those who are experiencing those relationships. When i was at 16 i was at my grandmothers house i watched a hallmark movie i remember had a dysfunctional violent relationship. Was driving home and there was a moment i had a thought i wonder with if my relationship with sean is abusive. No. Because that guy always was wearing the wife beater and always drunk. He was just a caricature of the monster and thats what they look like. That is not what sean is like. Except a tiny percentage of the time that he absolutely is like that. But in my mind if someone is like that all the time that its fine. And then what to capture for people is part of what makes the relationship so compelling that the love is real. And genuinely loving and compelling people. But at some point even to ask the hard question if i can help this person then know how can i take care of myself. And ultimately that made it very difficult and then to talk about your father consistently is when you start singing in public and there is one line that you said he wanted my voice to be heard so obviously your voice is heard now. He may have not had that in mind. So let us hear the voice your father had in mind and sing something for us. I can do that. I always sing a hymn. I hope you like it. I havent sung it in a while. [applause] thank you very much. That was wonderful. That was fun thank you very much. That was wonderful. That was fun. I have a question you at all these people trying to get donald trump elected president did you ever call them despicable the way you said it was for me to represent the president of the United States . Why do you draw the lines calling me despicable because i was a lawyer standing up for the constitution of the United States . [cheers and applause] but its okay for those that are trying to get trump elected . Im not trying to get trump elected. Im trying to tell everybody who to vote for and for the rights of all americans and you call that despicable . [applause] no wait. That is not a question. It is a speech. Let me tell you something you did not defend the constitution of the United States. You took that constitution into the gutter i feel that strongly and i said thats why it is despicable. Good evening. Welcome daughter of holocaust survivor trustee the living memorial of the holocaust its my pleasure before we begin i would like to say a few words for the museum of jewish heritage dedicated to fighting antisemitism for more than 20 years that museum has challengedis