Please welcome our guest speaker. [applause] hello, guess who i am. [laughter] if i have to give you an introduction about tara, you need to just get out of the whole you have been living in for a while because her book has just celebrated the hundredth consecutive week ahead of michelle malcolm, michelle, down there thats very cool. Im assuming that a lot of people are familiar with the narrative, and thats why youre so interested and youre s still here for the last lecture on the second day. I thought we would still go through some of her story because its so gripping and it starts in idaho, and actually to me at such a beautiful setting, there must be a lot of beautiful memories you still have from that. Yes. It was a really Beautiful Mountain that i grew up on. I still have really fond memories of being on that mountain and of playing on that mountain, i think its an incredible, we had this entire ground and wonderful space and a lot of great things that can happen. I guess we were the original free range kids, kind of hard core. So yes there is a lot of really wonderful things about it. Then of course there was some difficult things too, but the setting, the scenery, living in that place. Nature walks, i assume. Its just youre there all the time. You dont want to it youre just there constantly. One of the things when i would come back from college and be driving to town with my sister and i would just be talking about how wonderful everything is and shes like whats up with you, its just a field, theres going to be another field and i would say i need a picture of this and she would just roll her eyes. Your mother was an herbalist. Yes. She was an herbalist and a midwife so we grew a lot of food that we ate and we had animals that we raised and move from pasture to pasture so we were into herbalism and we were pretty involved with the land. A lot of different animals . Mostly normal ones, i guess we had goats, pigs. This is Rancho Mirage so normal animals is like a poodle. [laughter] we never had a poodle, no. That never happened. Normal farm animals, horses, cows, pigs, chickens, we had a lot of goats, we were goat people. What i think of as normal animals. And youre the youngest of seven so there are a lot of people around. Yes. Wouldnt go to school so my parents kind of had a different philosophy of a lot of things so they were opposed to a lot of things most people would take for granted. Doctors and hospitals would not have liked you. So my dad got a little more radical as he got older so my first three siblings went to school. They were born in hospital. Mn is my dad got older he got a little more radical so then he pulled the kids out of school, my older brothers, and then after that started with my Third Brother is when it started, everyone was born at home my fourth brother after that no birth certificates or anything like that. So no medical records, nothing no. I got my birth certificate when i was nine. Youre lucky you didnt look like me. Probably wouldve been harder. No documentation, thats the problem. [laughter] lucky for many reasons that you dont look like me. Well just leave that one for now. So, youre still reading, i think theres one reference about going to the carnegie library. Theres a library in town, reading was important to my parents so we all learn how to read. I was taught how to read by an older brother. Im pretty sure it was to win a bet with another one of my brothers about how fast i could read and apparently one of my brothers thought i was dom and thought i could not read. This is that age for. I think i was for, so we can all read, it was important to my parents that we could read the bible and the book of mormon, we were very religious so reading was very important. The rest of education was a little more piecemeal, a little more haphazard and some years my mother would say working to get very serious about the schooling this year end that would last a couple weeks and give way to the demands of her herbal business for the farm, or my parents were very devoted to food supply so they were very anxious that they needed to have a ten year supply of food to prepare for whatever catastrophe was going to come at the end of time. Mn since youre the only people who have food you have to protect the to food. Yes then you have to protect it from other people who dont have food so you it gets involved, that kind of planning. Ten years of food is a lot of food. Its not a little bit of food. Yes, nine people. So you mentioned your father kind of evolved in his way of thinking or he went more toward the french. Was there an event that changed the way he was viewing the world or was it just the progression. Its hard to say, there were definitely events that seemed to play into it and intensify it, i write about the effect of ruby ridge which is what i remember, and that my family and a pretty specific way. For my dad who for many years before that was already pretty frightened of the federal government, was already developing pretty radical ideas around government and school and doctors and things like that, i think ruby ridge, for him, really solidified that because thats the story of a federal government surrounding a family and essentially killing several members of that family. And not so far from you back no, they were in idaho and they were homeschoolers like my family so i think for my dad that really solidified in his mind a lot of the fears and things he was worried about. So, yeah, i think i had a pretty intense effect. I dont think anybody ever went to school after the ruby ridge incident where a lot of my siblings did go to a couple years of schooling before that. trigonometry, then he taught himself algebra, then he decided he would teach himself calculus but he didnt have enough books so he went to the high school can disable you give me a calculus book and the teacher laughed and said you cant teach yourself calculus. He said give me a book. I think i can. So he taught himself calculus and then one day i think he got almost a perfect score and then announced he was going to college. I didnt even know what that was. I think i was probably eight. It was a terrible thing thats what my dad said, then he just kind of left. Of the book is actually dedicated to tyler, is that right . And you credit him introducing music which i think you said was one of the main sources of inspiration for you to leave home and then see something greater outside of your world. It was a wonderful thing and i very much as described to my fathers worldview that when you are a kid get told things that make sense to you. Sorry, something is clicking back here. I very much have no intention of ever leaving so it really works fine for me. Then he played for me some opera and i was really arrested by it. I dont know what this is but one thing is no one is born learning how to sing like this. They teach you how to do this. I ended up saying how did i get to college and he said the teachers of math. Its not that hard, dont worry. So i tried it because he was acting as if it was a very normal thing to do and i didnt teach myself calculus. I barely managed to teach myself enough algebra to get through the exam, but i started waking up early trying to learn algebra and its a strange thing to try to explain to people but its still true that i more or less taught myself algebra because i like to think and that was the motivation for me. I dont know for sure what sort of less than there is in that accept maybe we should be a little thoughtful because you dont know where that will take them. Kerry diread when i got to colli discovered philosophy of these wonderful things. Then we came to this place here. You never know where these things are going to take you. But it will probably take you nowhere. So that you have that chapter called apache women. Its really good. I think that being modest you talk yourself and you are pretty set and theres one that i read a where your father comes into your room at night and says i prayed to the lord about your decision and hes called me to testify and give our casting away his blessings to go after mans knowledge. In the wake of the next day and decided not to go to college. I very much described my dads worldview. Mostly i subscribe to it and then for all kinds of reasons but even once i did go, i think i still have to believe that i shouldnt go and that theres something kind of with good about the fact. My dad very much had a doctrine that we were told we were a peculiar people. For me to go to college was a huge breach of that and i thought it felt like a personal failing that i didnt have enough faith and conviction to stick out in this life that i have been told is the right to life. But it didnt feel like the right place for me. And i think that when you are a kid, i mean i guess i was 17, but i didnt know how to reconcile those two things. I have a kind of loyalty to my parents and their way of life and beliefs. I felt like i go to them that. Then i felt like i also owe something to myself. I should explore this. I want to see that i am able to do and i really want to do this and i could not reconcile those two obligations. There wasnt a way to do with. Your mothers role is interesting in this because she encourages you in this you are the one that i thought would get out of here so you need to go and not stay at times and then other times it seems like she is pulling back on that. My mother is really complicated. Whenever i think about my mom, i think about the kind of two versions of her. So, theres my mother i think of as my mother and then theres my fathers wife and they are just not the same person. My mother is a really different person when my dad is either fair or is kind of acting on his behalf. Shes a very different person. When i was younger i felt there was more of her as my mother, and then as i got older, i felt like the person was less and less present. So it was unpredictable putsch mother you would wendy welch at a little unpredictable. In the nature of mother is nothing definite can be fed. [inaudible] so you go to college and find its very different from that of your classmates. So that is one obstacle. Nus and sociathen you have somel obstacles. Even though in retrospect it is like a little transition. It seems like a Shocking Party school is less david cote more or less. Like men and women live in different buildings and theres a curfew that is 12 00 at night and then you can only be in the living room. You have to go to the bathroom in an apartment across the street when in 01. It is serious but i felt that it was the most terrifying. People were wearing tank tops and drinking mountain dew and a vicodin to do with it. I thought i was surrounded by gentiles and that is the word i used. Theres a lot of focus on the academic obstacles to overcome the learning about all these things that were not the way you have been taught. Theres also the financial obstacles. It sounds like you were really broke a lot of the first year. Luckily it wasnt expensive because the church subsidized a lot of it and so you could actually get through. I think tuition at the time i went through with 1,600 or something, which is unbelievable the kind of education that it is and then my friend i will never forget his 110 a month. So you could do that. You could work a couple of jobs in the summer. Its only promising that way that he would constantly and endlessly preoccupied with money and you could have woken me up at 3 00 in the morning to show how much is in your bank account and i could have told you 26. 57. I knew that any hour of today how much i had was coming in and who why you would want and when. Dutch takes a tremendous amount back for the lack of a better term for everything i was thinking about. And then the best thing happened to me that could happen to me was i needed a root canal. It isnt obvious why that is such a good thing but for my case i couldnt afford it. I didnt have the money, like 1,400 i didnt have it so i ended up going in and talking to a bishop that was kind of mormon and he tried to get the church is money that id been raised with this insane idea of independence i wouldnt take it and after weeks and weeks he convinced me to apply for a program. A whole other complicated things for me to do. Shes used to not getting enough money and saying i was supposed to get more or i was supposed to get less and didnt have time for whatever this is. So i cash it and pay for it to get fixed and i bought my books and i pay all my rent for the semester and i had a thousand dollars left over and this was the first time i had anything like that. I guess its the first time i experienced the most powerful thing about money than most powerful advantage you can think about things that are not money and if you have a lot of money and still think about all the time, you are probably doing it wrong. To be a student to learn. I could actually take classes and focus on things and decide exactly how much money i had or how much i could work or could i sell plasma to make my rent payment and i could stop thinking about all that stuff and so i could actually take classes that i didnt need to take and one of the classes i took is psych 101, which i didnt need. I had other requirements i thought i would take psychology, whatever that is and so i enrolled in the early psych 101 which is probably every parents nightmare and then they will come home and psycho analyze them, which is exactly what happened. But to me it was incredibly important. I had no concept until i took that class. It sounds like there were things you recognized. Hes going through the symptoms of the cycles of grandeur and paranoia and delusion and hes explaining it all in i wrote in my notes they didnt like that. And that kind of paranoia he will never see a doctor for it as a whole new lens i could look at my childhood and understand what had happened. Other explanations for why we were not allowed to go to school or why we had so many injuries but it was never something clear to me and there were a lot of questions that i had but i just didnt have an answer to and the answers i had were kind of tough and then that explanation was helpful. You are in a state of mind now that you have the money and freedom to learn more and youve been awoken to the fact some of the things you thought were not true is that almost an advantage that you assumed you know nothing in a way because it wouldve been didnt and still believe in things does that create a hunger or thirst. Maybe there is a slight hunger that came out of it. That is a flattering way to describe it. Sometimes when i tell people i have a phd but i dont have a High School Diploma it is a little bit of a overcompensatine overcompensating may be. Took it a little far. But you could call it a hunger. That sounds nicer. Insatiable hunger. I dont know. There were a lot of things i didnt know but i have ideas about things, just a lot of them were wrong. I thought i knew things. I wasnt aware of my own ignorance until i think i became aware of my own when i learned about the Civil Rights Movement and that was the first time that i thought i didnt know anything. I heard a weird version of the dutch really not good. I attended the class and then we did a section on slavery and i had seen images in the time some of the famous photographs that you see from that time and i read accounts or we have seen the sketch and it was clear to me this wasnt really when dad told us about this this wasnt what i imagined a. That we talk about Something Else and i came into class and he talked about this thing called the Civil Rights Movement and i didnt know what that was. He puts put a picture up of ths woman and says she has been arrested for taking a seat on the bus. And i thought that he meant she had been arrested for stealing the bus seat. [laughter] which is kind of an unfortunate as understanding. To take a seat versus to take that seat. So i was still trying to figure out how did she get it loose. [laughter] i grew up in a junkyard. I had a decent idea of what would be involved because we had done it before. That isnt really a tangible after inactivity. [laughter] theres enough of the other questions. Its a pretty big honor and it seems your parents are kind of proud of this and they look like the home schooling paid off. Yes. [laughter] helix that way of telling it. Then you are exposed to more ideas and you write about the idea of berlin and i dont think that we need to go into all of that but it sounds like at cambridge you realized you have a narrative that is a interesting to other people. Is that when you Start Talking about your childhood . I guess a little bit towards the end. I was pretty secretive about the whole thing and when the book came out i had good friends of mine calling and saying wait, what because i never talked to them about any of it. They kind of knew i was homeschooled but i had a very cleahave a veryclean and safe vt but i told and i think part of it was you dont like being an outsider in that way and you dont like being the one person that is that it doesnt know anything or doesnt know what is going on. But then i think i went through this tremendously difficult process with my family because they were becoming more radical insight is becoming a little bit more mainstream. And after i went through that process, thats when i started thinking maybe there is a reason to write it. I dont know for sure if there is that i will experiment. So the main reason is to put the story out there is the reason you are writing and can told yourself you are writing a. Of a it would be a useful thing to write about education and somehow i could write an entire bucket of my education and not to mention my family. But i convinced myself that it is possible. Theres so much about your story and the people are fascinated with your journey. Theres not enough. I read this book when it first came out and i read it again when the book club chose it about a year ago and then i read it again with the residents in my hospital. The first time you are flipping the pages to figure out what is going on. The next one was moved by the language and i wonder if you can read two paragraphs because i would like to give the audience a simple voice, your writing voice and there are two with a marked. If they are so the lists it is each following all the rest in the verse of movement and a Million Dollar spending one after another as they dip their heads the shape lasts a moment and is as close as anyone gets to seeing the wind. There is a sense of sovereignty, the perception of privacy in isolation. Its part of the sheer immensity and its magnitude which renders the human has no consequence. [applause] you are writing this as a first language. Its hard to imagine writing so beautifully does not coming to deal with them until they were in college. I had grown up with about. Ive grown up in that kind of literary tradition it was in the language that was completely foreign to me but the idea that i wouldve her righ would ever s incredibly foreign and strange. It is an academic writing. They are almost diametrically opposed to each other. I think what it takes to write you want to see everything and you want it to be totally plain and i think thats kind of the a kiss of death in the storytelling actually. You want to build in a bit more complexity and se see this the n to come to their own conclusions this kind of the great risk especially about your own life. If you write a book that is about your wife that is experienced about putting people in the scenes. That is a strange kind of gamble to take. But i think better than an essay that says im going to call you about this person and heres the dilemma and what it all means people might process and feel through it and come to a conclusion that is really going to move them or stay with them they have to kind of experience if. So i did decide to write a book. Its not an essay argument is just a story and everybody can come up with it and a whole bunch of differences. I have people come up to me at the events. One right after the other and in all cases i just kind of smile and say thank you because i know that it has nothing to do with me. Its got everything to do with them and what they need to hear and think about and what is in their own lives and i think that is the point of the story. It is exactly what it should be. You did write it for your self in something. I was trying to make sense of it and figure out fundamentally i think i was trying to figure out if i was a good person. I wasnt sure i was. I did something in my own mind that was unthinkable which is i had written to my parents i said i love you but i needed it to be the case we dont talk or see each other very much because i just need a break and theres a word for that it is cold estrangement. I couldnt call her that at the time. I just needed the space. I thought it was the ultimate un excusable thing. Youre not allowed to do that. If you do that its because you are a capable person. And yet i didnt have any other choice, at least i couldnt see one. I have been trying to have a peaceful relationship with my family for as long as i could remember that it just wasnt happening for me. So a lot of the reason i wrote the book was to answer that question. Is it okay that i did this. And did you get some resolution to that . It helped me see the truth of that which is i think sometimes the choices that we make that we punish ourselves most for the choices where we really didnt have any choice at all. I realized there wasnt another path. This is just one path and it helped me to peace with where i ended up. It was probably the best ending and i could still love my parents. It wasnt like i stopped loving them. Its just the form it had to take for a while. Or you figure things out and its nice and you kind of have it create a narrative and you move on. You are making us talk about this over and over. That is true. Thanks. [applause] it was therapeutic and she said no, writing a book is terribly therapeutic. In your family of mine. Or maybe they dont want their name. Was there ever a consideration because it is easy to figure out who your parents are and did you ever consider publishing a under someone elses name . My understanding of the memoir is that its pretty tricky. I think that you could publish it as a novel which i did think about. I thought about just saying it is a novel but then the first one is no one would have believed it. Too weird. I told one of my brothers when i called them up and said im going to write about our family there was a pause on the other side of the line he said you wont have to make anything up so i thought i can do that so that was the first reason that the other i think like a lot of other people you feel is kind of isolated from people and it feels like youre the only person thats ever had this problem and i remember thinking to myself how could anyone think im a good person if they know that my mother doesnt think im a good person. Because my parents at that time were saying i was possessed. They believed they lived their faith into the reason is that i was possessed and so i thought how do i tie how could anybody ever trust me again given this reality and i think once i had a little distance from the it seemed important that if i was going to write this story and say this happened that it needed to have happened to a real person and someone i would stand up and say this is me, this is my story and it might be your story with elements of yours but it happened to be real person and that person is me and it just felt like a lot of the point of doing that would be if you were kind of fictionalizing and standing behind the fiction. So why did i could to protect privacy and give people as much space as i could but i thought i really have to write it under my own name. With fiction the characters often get twodimensional and here you labored so hard and you are still successful showing the complexity. The most complicated relationship is often to do with your brother, sean. There are so many things he does with you that are wanting and you talk about him saving your life and at a great risk to himself your father tries to get you to work with a thing called the sheer, osha would be over there. But he says if youre going to do im going to do it. And then he really loves you and puts himself in harms way for you but is also the source of a lot of european. Recognizable to the people experiencing those relationships and i remember i was at my grandmothers house when i watched this hallmark movie i cant remember what it was that i remember it had a really dysfunctional relationship in a violent. And i remember i was driving home, really young, i was driving home and i remember there was a moment i had a spot i wondered if my relationship was abusive and i was like no because that guy in the movie was always wearing a wife beater shirt and he was just everything he was and he was the character of the monster and i thought well thats what they look like and that is and wha isnt what. Except for a tiny percentage of the time and then he absolutely is like that. But i think that in my mind i thought if someone doesnt like althat all the time, then its fine. Its something i wanted to try to capture for people the heart of what makes those relationships so compelling and so hard to leave. They are loving compelling people who need help or whatever but you have to ask the hard question and if the answer is no copyright take care of myself in that situation, but i felt like i have to write abou had to wrie relationship that i have experienced it which wasnt completely white or black. One of the times you talk about your father being consistently proud of you is when you start singing in public and theres one line i think that is so ironic and you explain things he is doing and said he wanted my voice to be better and so obviously your voice is heard now. He may not have had that in mind. I wonder if you would let us hear the voice that he had in mind in singing something for us. I can do that. I always sing a hymn. Lord my god, i often wonder consider all the world thy hands have made i hear the Rolling Thunder music mac throughout the universe displayed. Then sings my soul music mac my savior god to me how great thou are then sings my soul music mac my savior god to be how great thou art how great thou art [applause] thank you very much. Offers his thoughts on what he calls the new conservative agenda. This is hosted by the Richard Nixon president ial library and museum in yorba linda california. [inaudible conversations] ladies and gentlemen, please welcome president nixons grandson, christopher nixon