Poured Over: Tara Westover on Educated

“You know, when I wrote the book, I sort of thought it would resonate with a fairly narrow… I was writing it for people who are more or less like me, you know, little girls who grew up in junkyards and didn’t go to school, and then going to college and everything changed.” Tara Westover’s memoir was a massive hit with readers everywhere when it was first published; four years later, Educated is out in paperback, and Tara joins us on the show to talk about choices and boundaries, family and home, how excited she is for new readers to come to the book in its new format, what’s next for her and much more. Featured Books: Educated by Tara Westover, Second Place by Rachel Cusk, Playing and Reality by D.W. Winnicott, and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis.

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.

New episodes of Poured Over land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus eps on Saturdays) here and your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: Tara Westover, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. It has been almost four years since Educated came out and spent what, two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list.

Tara Westover: Oh, I don’t know the number I hear a lot is 135 weeks so what is that? I don’t know what that is. That seems.

B&N: It’s two and … It’s more than two and a half.

TW : The first question has math, I guess. 54 weeks? years. So 104? Yes. I’m gonna go with Yes. So that question.

B&N: Okay, Dr. Westover, you did teach yourself algebra so that you could take the ACT. So I’m giggling because your math is still better than mine.

TW: You can imagine now what that experience was like.

B&N: I ditched out of all of the maths in high school. As soon as I got through algebra, I was like, Yeah, I’m good. Thanks. No calculus for me. I did the bare minimum. And then I got to college. And it’s like, I don’t have to do this anymore. This is exciting.

TW: Fake it all you want in college, within reason. Yeah.

B&N: So how does it feel now? To have Educated coming out in paperback, almost four years later?

TW: Yeah, it’s good. You know, I’m really glad that it’s happening. It’s been a wonderful kind of privileged and exciting fact that it has been held this long, because it was doing well. And that’s been wonderful. But for me, I think I really wanted a paperback, I want it out there for cheaper. I also want to close that chapter of my life in a way and not in the sense that I would take anything back or that I would, you know, I would write a different story now a little bit because I’m growing, and I’m older. And I hope at least that that story stands the way it was because it was always meant to be written by someone at a very particular moment, and a particular juncture. So even though I stand by it, the way I wrote it, I also would write it differently today. And so for me to have it come out complete its little lifecycle, which includes a paperback and it can do whatever it wants now, and I don’t know, for me, there’s something very nice about that circle, coming around. And on to the next thing a little bit.

B&N: I really love the idea to have younger readers picking it up. And whether that’s college or high school. And sometimes, you know, hardcovers are not the format that they’re picking up. For the few folks who have not either heard of Educated or read Educated, it is a story of transformation. It’s a story of choice choices, you made choices people in your family made it is it is a story of choice. It is one of the most riveting books I’ve ever read. I actually gave myself the hiccups. The first time I read it, because I holding my breath. And when I finished it, and I was reading a bound manuscript, so I didn’t have a jacket. I didn’t know anything about you. I just had your words, you know, bound into this, you know, a bound manuscript.

TW: Yeah, like an advanced copy.

B&N: It wasn’t even an advanced copy. It was literally just typewritten pages. And your publisher at the time handed them off to me as I was going to the airport and said, You have to take this. And I read it in a single flight. And I was holding my breath so much, I gave myself and scared the woman sitting next to me. She was like, are you okay? I’m like, this book. And I couldn’t tell her what I was reading it. Because, you know, I don’t even think there was a pub date or anything yet. Right. But I remember thinking when I got to the end of the book that I needed to know if you were okay. And it seems to me, you’re pretty okay.

TW: Ah, yeah, I think I’m okay. You know, it’s kind of a process the being Okay, so I’ve been I’ve been raised in this family. And, you know, I didn’t go to school, no birth certificate. And it was a difficult experience. And there was some neglect and some violence. And for me, the decision to leave my family was so difficult, actually, even with all the good reasons to do that. I love them. I want to say and I guess I think of Educated as about that decision, difficult moment where you’re maybe even split within yourself about whether it’s okay to go whether you should go you know, I love these people, does that mean that I shouldn’t say goodbye to them, and finally realizing you can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them. And that’s how I think of Educated. And then after that, there’s the whole process of kind of being an adult, and dealing with the emotional inheritance that you’ve been given and trying to figure out what patterns you have in your mind that are going to lead you to just keep repeating some of those maybe not the particulars, but certainly the the emotional route, like feeling of that. And so I I’ve had to do a lot of work and a lot of thinking and a lot of therapy. So that’s kind of that’s where my mind is right now is on that next part of the story. So yeah, I am okay. But I would say being okay, is it wasn’t immediate, the being okay. It was a definite process.

B&N: Do you remember when you realized you were going to write a book?

TW: You know, for a long time, I kind of I didn’t think it was okay to write a memoir. I really was. I mean, I couldn’t even go to therapy and talk about my family because I felt so guilty talking about them. And I think that can be a really big difference between a healthier family where it’s okay to complain and people are always coming out complaining about their mothers or their brothers. That actually complaining is probably a sign of health, actually, when people feel comfortable enough to say, oh my god, My mom, but I didn’t grow up in that kind of family, I grew up in a family where criticizing in any way was deeply, deeply not alright. And so yeah, I couldn’t even go to psychotherapy, because the idea of criticizing them even in private, was not okay. So writing the book was really difficult thing to do, or really difficult decision, I was breaking a lot of the rules that I felt like they were just really deeply embedded in me. So I don’t, I can’t give you a moment because it was such a war with myself trying to overcome it. But I remember telling myself a lot, because the decision to write a book like this is such a big one, I remember telling myself a lot, I’m just going to write it. And I’m not going to decide what to do with it until it’s done. And so I didn’t sell the book on proposal, I sold the whole thing. And I think that’s the only way that I could get around the idea of making it public was that I could, I knew exactly what it was not an outline, but in in being, but I had to write the whole thing to even begin to wrap my mind around what was a really difficult thing for me, kind of instinctually.

B&N: You talked about how the details matter a lot throughout this book, and you’re working in the scrapyard at age 11. And you’re not going to school with the other kids. And there’s a lot, there’s, there’s a lot, but the emotion that you capture, there are plenty of people who can identify with wanting to belong in their own family, feeling like an outsider wanting to be part of wanting to understand where you fit in this family. And yet, for multiple reasons, you have a relationship with part of your family and not another part of the family. And there’s this idea in America that the happy family takes precedent, we should all be reconciled with our people. And I’m a big believer in making family, however, that shapes up for you, for some people, family of origin works. And that’s great. Can we talk about what that means for you, in terms of making a decision to not just set out on your own but set your own terms? Boundaries? Basically?

TW: Yeah, you know, it’s not a decision that I would choose. For most people, it’s not one I would hope for, I mean, what you hope for with people is that they could have healthy or healthy enough relationships that they wouldn’t need to make these kinds of choices. Like that’s kind of what you’d hope for. But I do think, and I’ve heard from so many readers, since the book came out, you know, I’ve got thousands of letters. And what you realize is, there are a lot of people out there walking around out there with this just enormous sense of guilt, because they can’t make their relationship with their family work, they can’t make it into something healthy, where they aren’t being hurt by the love that they feel for this person. And for those people, I think not all of them, but some of them might have to make a difficult choice between taking care of themselves and taking care of these obligations that they feel. And so abuse, neglect, dysfunction, alcoholism, mental illness, these things are real things. And if you have a relationship with someone who’s suffering from one of these things might be that that relationship is going to be harmful for you. And it has to be a possibility has to be on the table, that if you can’t mold that relationship into something healthy, that you can make it healthy by finding a boundary that works for you, that just has to be possible. And it’s not the right answer for everybody. But it was the right answer for me. But it was still a really difficult decision because I love my family. But it was just that love was kind of poisoning me.

B&N: When did you realize that your family wasn’t like the other families in your community?

TW: No, I always knew that because we didn’t go to school. And everybody else went to school, we didn’t go to the doctor, everybody else went to the doctor, we didn’t have birth certificates. We lived in this completely different way. The way I experienced it as a kid was that we were better. You know, we were the righteous people and everybody else were the sinners and they were inferior. I experienced it as a kind of specialness, that we were unique, but it was really positive and wonderful. We were doing a god one and everything else was living in this horrible way. And as I got older, that got more complicated because I wanted to go to school, and I couldn’t I wasn’t allowed and I wanted to sing in the choir at school, maybe I will go to school, I’ll just go to choir and I wasn’t allowed. And it just got more and more complicated. Finding that what I wanted for myself was in conflict with what my dad wanted for me and realizing I think at a fairly young age that because my father’s ideology was as rigid as it was that there actually wasn’t room for me to make a different choice. So if I got married and put my kids in school, that wouldn’t be okay. Or if I had my children on hospital instead of delivered by my mother because my dad didn’t believe in what he called the medical establishment that really wouldn’t be okay and kind of just realizing there’s a narrow path here. If I’m going to be a part of this family, I really have to live the way they’re living and realizing that’s not what I want. I don’t want that and what does that choice gonna look like as I get older? And for a long time, I think I was a little bit in denial about what was possible, given the extremism of my parents.

B&N: And your parents’ extremism didn’t sort of pop up overnight. It happened kind of gradually. I mean, you knew both sets of grandparents and both sets of grandparents lived very differently from your parents.

TW: Yeah, my dad had been put in school, my mother went to school. They were, yeah, they were raised in fairly mainstream kind of Mormon families. And then my dad, even when they were first married, I think my dad was a unique individual, but I don’t think he was, you wouldn’t think he was too extreme. My oldest brother was born in a hospital, the older boys were put in school, it was a gradual process, that kind of withdrawal, the we’re not going to go to the hospital, we’re not going to get birth certificates, we’re not going to get vaccinations, we’re not going to put the kids in school, we’re not going to insure their vehicles, we’re not going to, you know, register, you know, just this kind of way of living where we were isolated in that way that I don’t think for my older siblings that was their, the early years of their lives. That wasn’t their experience. By the time I came along, me and my three older siblings, there were seven of us all together, we never set foot in a classroom, didn’t have birth certificates, we were just living in a very different way.

B&N: And there were car accidents, and there were burns, and there were serious puncture wounds.

TW: Well, I’ve hypothesized that my dad has bipolar or something similar. I’m not a medical professional. But that’s the thing that makes most sense for me. And that is an illness that tends to get worse as you get older. And I think, especially in an isolated environment, I think, yeah, his beliefs definitely got more extreme as the years pass.

B&N: And you’ve made it clear too, that your education saved your life, it changed your trajectory. And you talk about education as being part curiosity, part discovery. And one of the things I always loved about this book is that you essentially taught yourself to write a memoir by listening to the New Yorker podcast. And you’ve also talked about how when you got to college, you have to learn to read differently. So you’ve got all these moments where you’re taking your own experience. And essentially, and I referenced this earlier, when I said you taught yourself math in order to take the ACT, you are one of these intensely self directed learners. You really are, does that come from your family background? Or is that a factory preset for you as a person?

TW: That’s good question, but I have no idea what the answer is. It’s kind of a chicken in the egg question. I was alone a lot as a kid, I didn’t have a teacher. Because my I mean, it’s not like my mother wouldn’t teach us anything. But it was pretty erratic. I remember getting a grammar book when I was 9/10 years old, like an English grammar. And like, my mother was Irish, she discovered weevil in all of the oats that morning, like many five gallon buckets, she’s going through all of them, and like, you know, screaming at all these weevils she’s finding and I remember, you know, sitting on one of these buckets of weevil and saying, Hey, Mom, what’s a noun? And you know, she’s just like, not into it. And there was some kind of crisis like that most of the time. So it’s not like she wouldn’t talk to us about school, but I didn’t have a teacher in that sense. So she’s pretty busy and pretty distracted. So I, if I wanted to find something, you mostly just kind of had to do it. And that was the ethos of my family, which was not all bad. I wouldn’t put quite that much onus on my kids if I was doing it again. But there was something good about it. You know, I did learn I was by myself a lot. I learned how to read things and break them down. And that was good. But whether that’s, you know, as you said, a factory preset or product of just life of almost no adult supervision. I just don’t know the answer to that question.

B&N: But you guys were living close to the poverty line, if not below the poverty line for a lot of your childhood, right? I mean, it was rough.

TW: Yeah, my dad, it was better when I got older. When I was 15, or 16. I think he was doing much better. He had a construction business that but when I was younger, was the scrap yard only. And now I’m sure they were below. Yeah, I’m sure of that.

B&N: So we’re seeing a deeper and deeper divide between rural and urban America. And part of that is class. Part of that is education. Part of that is social media, which were all in the world. We know what it looks like. But do you think any one of those things carries more weight than the other when we’re having these conversations? I mean, do we need to address education first? Do we need to talk about class first? Or can we even separate them? I mean, certainly social media exacerbates those divides. But where do we start?

TW: I think it’s very difficult in the United States and increasingly in other countries, but I think especially United States, it’s very difficult to separate education from class. If you plot out people’s educational opportunities, whether they’re going to get a degree, a college degree, it just, it’s a complete diagonal, causal slope, they correlate perfectly and that is really troubling. It’s not really what you’d really what you want to see and this idea that education, which I think is traditionally meant To be the vehicle of opportunity, and the way that people are able to climb out and get better lives is increasingly allocated according to wealth is a really troubling idea. And that it’s done that way, even at our public institutions is a very troubling idea. Increasingly, even public universities are operating, I think more like businesses, and they charge whatever they can get away with. So I don’t think you can totally separate them. Now, I think the backdrop that you have against all of that is, as you said, social media and I’ve talked a little bit about, and many other people have also about the economic situation, which is that the cities and the secondary cities or urban centers are largely growing and benefiting from technology and globalization. And a lot of the rest of the country is sort of dying, I was in my hometown, a year or so ago with my cousin. And we were driving down the main street and everything was boarded up, and there used to be two grocery stores in the town. Now, there was just one. But I noticed that there were two new funeral parlors, and she turned to me and she said, You know, it’s getting, so the only thing there is to do in town is die. And I just think, you know, these towns, a lot of them are literally dying. And for those people, that just they’re having a completely different experience than people living in upper class, middle class urban areas. So I think when you put social media into the mix, and all we see of each other are these caricatures, and you got conspiracy theories running wild. And I don’t know, when we all got together and decided it would be a really good idea, if all of the news that we consumed was fed to us by companies who are trying to sell us things. And what gets attention more than people you hate doing things that you hate? And so what do you tackle first is a really excellent question. I do think privacy has to come back in some real way. And the idea that these companies are allowed to target information in this way in order to sell you things seems insane to me, like nobody’s consented to that. And not with any meaningful choice. And the education, I think, the education, it is so crucial, it’s such a big part of what gives someone the ability to determine the outcome of their life is what kind of education they have access to. And so making that ladder actually accessible again, you know, it used to be and now it is pretty hard to see how people, if you were born in a poor household, low income household, as people like to say, very difficult, much harder than it used to be to work your way out of that.

B&N: Do you know what the population of your hometown is, these days versus what it was when you were a kid?

TW: My own town isn’t isn’t shrinking necessarily. I looked it up a year or two ago, and it wasn’t a lot, I think it had even grown a little bit. But I think what you’re seeing is a lot of people would work in the county seat when I was a kid, which is about 15 miles away. Now they’re driving 30-45 minutes to work in Logan. And I just think the experience of their lives, this isn’t going to be captured in data. But if you think about what it would be like to spend your life working at the local hardware store, with someone that you know, and there’s five of you, and you run this hardware store, and you work there in town, so that’s what it was like when I was growing up. And now those same people are driving 45 miles to go work the checkout at Walmart or something. Those people are having very different lives than their parents did, or than they were 10 years ago, and in some cases are getting paid less, but I would argue what they’re getting paid isn’t isn’t the issue as much as the fact that they’ve lost meaningful control over their lives. You know, I mean, working for a massive corporation, like Walmart is so different, I think from from working in a in a business in your town. And that sense of just being opinion, you know, being a cog in a machine, and you can just be replaced at any time. And I think, yeah, that sense of alienation and being left behind. And I understand why it’s not necessarily about the money, although the money is a problem. People aren’t making what they used to. But I think even beyond that, just the sense of not meaning anything to the world, you know, not not having the fact that you’re there as opposed to somebody else matter.

B&N: And home has always been a really powerful idea, especially as part of this whole American mythology, whether it’s the American Dream piece of it, or the idea of, you know, freedom out in the west, and I grew up on the East Coast, and we were fed all these stories, you know, go west, go west, go west, kind of thing. How has your definition of home changed?

TW: Well, I had to change it because I left where I grew up, and I feel like I’ve had to find and make a kind of series of homes with different people. So I made a home at Brigham Young University when I was there, and then I left and went to Cambridge, and that became a home for five or six years and then moved to New York, and I’ve found a very different community here, I would like to stay and kind of be now in one place for a bit longer, because because of school, I was traveling a lot and had to recreate myself in my friendships a lot. And I would just say, as I’ve gotten older, I used to be someone who would have like a big circle of friends and see a lot of different people. And I don’t do so much of that anymore. I see the same five, you know, all the time. And what I’ve noticed is that really works for me, I’m happy with that. And then occasionally I bring what you know, I see somebody else but but I really just see the same. You know, it was funny when the lockdown came and you’re supposed to reach restrict your community, it was like had very little effect on me, I was already pretty locked in. And just because that’s what I like, I like seeing the same people all the time, people are different. I really like the kinds of friendships where you don’t ever give anyone you know, an update. Because when you see them, they don’t say what’s new with you, they say, Oh, how did that argument turn out with your editor or whatever, you know, like how they already know. And they’re asking, like, what’s the next part of the story, as opposed to what’s new with you, where I always feel like I’m summarizing my life every time I see somebody and but you know, people are different. But actually what it takes for me to be happy, socially speaking is remarkably few people.

B&N: Which is kind of interesting, given that you didn’t have a lot of friends when you were a kid, your friends were your siblings. I mean, you weren’t part of this large until you started doing musical theater. And this is something I’ve always wanted to ask you about that musical theater was okay. And that you could participate in that piece of it.

TW: all this like positive attention from people in the town that he didn’t normally get. And so it ended up being this thing where he was deeply split within himself. And every time I did a play, my sister, you know, would never have been allowed to be out in town at night by herself, you know, would never have had that kind of freedom. But I was allowed to do it. My dad was always so deeply conflicted about it, you know, he would say, well, we don’t know what you’re getting up to over there in town, you could be doing anything and, and he was always saying he was gonna pull me out of the next play, and I wouldn’t be allowed to do it. And then ultimately, you go to a show and you’d get all these Pat’s on the back. And then he would let me go to the next one. And so I think it was lucky for me that I had that particular skill because it gave me a little way out into the outside world that I think a lot of my siblings weren’t allowed.

B&N: And your older brother Tyler was the first to go to college. Right? And then Richard followed after you are before you?

TW: It was actually Tyler went, and then I went. Tyler helped me and then I went, and then together Tyler and I sort of helped our brother Richard go.

B&N: Okay, so the three of you have PhDs?
TW: Yeah, we seriously overcompensated? Yeah.

B&N: Can I ask what their PhDs are in?

TW: Well they’re science. Yeah, well, they’re like, mechanical engineering and chemistry, and I barely understand what they do.

B&N: But they found their way out too. And again, they saved their lives, with their education as well. You had originally learned to write by reading the Bible and the Book of Mormon and some speeches by leaders in the Church of Latter Day Saints. Am I supposed to call them Latter Day Saints or Mormons? I’m sorry.

TW: I think they’re trying to call themselves, I always say Mormons, that was allowed when I grew up. But now, the Church wants to be called Latter Day Saints. But I always like, I like Mormon. Mormon’s nice.

B&N: But you also had some professors, once you got to Cambridge. And it may have actually started at Brigham Young, who thought you had a real talent for writing. But there was something about the voice. Let’s talk about the evolution of your voice for a second because here you are. You’re not reading The Phantom Tollbooth, you’re not reading Little House on the Prairie, and you’re not moving into, you know, Stephen King and things like this. Was it really just the New Yorker podcast that taught you how to do voice?

TW: No, it wasn’t just that that was really helpful. I wrote a lot of academic papers. And I learned how to do that. Because I was trained to do that. At BYU, I was trained at Cambridge, I was trained, and I learned how to make a kind of argument. And then when I decided to try to write this book, I thought, well, these skills will transfer perfectly. And so I was writing these things in this like journalistic kind of insufferable, this is what I’m here’s my argument, my three supporting points, my summary conclusion, and I had this writing group in London of aspiring writers who were, they met every Tuesday at nine o’clock, and they were hungry and tired and they worked all day jobs and so the bar of entertainment was pretty high because you know, they’re tired and I was reading these just insufferable, stuffy and they just hated it. I mean, They hated it. They hated it. They hated it. And they were right. It was bad. And so I was listening to a fiction podcast. And I was reading a lot of books about grammar and how to make sentences more interesting. But I would say something between the New Yorker and my writing group, because having them just tell me over and over again, this is so boring and insufferable and preachy. And like just, I hate it, you know, I eventually wrote something that was just a story. And I stopped doing all the things I was doing that were really bad habits, like telling people what the story means. And then I brought something in, and they really liked it. And I knew that they were sincere in liking it, because they’d been so mean before that. And so, I just slowly learned, but I do think it was mostly reading my work aloud to these people, having them just hate it. And then going back and sitting down in the and being like ok. How is this different from the things that I like so much? You know, what am I doing that is so different. And the New Yorker fiction podcast is so good, because the writers read the stories and then they discuss them. And they will tell you why the story works. And they’ll give you the tools. If you want them, they’re there, so that was really helpful for me.

B&N: So who have you been reading lately?

TW: Um, I just finished Rachel Cusk The Second Place, which I thought was so beautiful. And and then I picked up Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary yesterday. And it’s so good. It’s so good. Yeah. So I, I was reading that this morning even and was just like, Oh, my God, these sentences, I just love them. So those are the two that I’ve been that I’ve been working on lately. And I’ve been reading a lot of psychology books. So I just finished Winnicott Playing and Reality, who’s a really famous British psychoanalyst, and that was really helpful book. If you’re into psychology and you’re thinking a lot about, you know, why am I the way I am? That can be an interesting book.

B&N: Lydia Davis also has a great translation of the first volume of Proust. And I did not care for Bovary or the first volume of Proust until Lydia Davis translated. And I was like, Oh, I am all in now. Yeah, I didn’t realize that I was a snotty teenager, about a lot of things. But Lydia Davis, saved both Bovary and Proust.

TW: It’s so beautiful, what she’s done. I’m really enjoying it.

B&N: You have spent a lot of time on the road now, talking to different groups. And yeah, we’ve done a lot of stuff virtually in the last couple of years. But you’ve been traveling pretty steadily since March of 2018. When the book came out, what have you learned from your readers?

TW: That’s a good question. I mean, I think I was surprised to find out. You know, when I wrote the book, I sort of thought it would resonate with a fairly narrow, I was writing it for people who are more or less like me, you know, a little girls who grew up in junkyards and didn’t go to school, and then going to college and everything changed. I thought, oh, all five of these people in the country are going to really like this book. And it was a little bit, I keep coming to humbling, but not really, because it also made me very arrogant, because people like my book, but it also made me a little bit humble. Both of those things, if I can just be totally honest, I felt both arrogant and humble. You know, nobody has an easy life, necessarily. And growing up is hard for everybody. And you don’t have to have been raised by a survivalist in the mountains, to have a really complicated relationship with your parents, and to be making some really difficult decisions. And so that was truly a little bit humbling for me to have the dentists on the Upper East Side, you know, talk to me, and I could just tell this person is really struggling and is carrying a heavy burden and realizing Yeah, you don’t have to be raised the way I was raised for that decision. You know, what do I owe them? What do I owe myself? How do I take care of them? How do I take care of myself to be weighing on you in an incredibly heavy way? And so, I guess I learned something about just life is hard for almost everybody growing up is hard for almost everybody. So that was, it was truly kind of a humbling experience.

B&N: So what do you hope new readers discover, in Educated? Let’s talk to the handful of folks who are going to find this book for the first time, which is partially why we’re staying away from spoilers. There’s a lot in this book.

TW: I’ve always felt like books, even memoirs, but any book really, it’s a conversation between the writer and the reader. And I have people come up to me and say all kinds of different things about the book. You know, I’ve had people come up to me and say, I’m so glad that you’re safe now. You’re never going to see those people again, and I’ve had people come up to me and say I just know that you and your family are going to be fine, like reconciliation is right around the corner and I always think that has nothing to do with me as everything do with them. I wanted it to be that way I wanted people to substitute their own stories for my story and to see themselves reflected. And I think that’s what stories do for us, we see the decisions that people made difficult moments. And we judge those decisions when not hatefully, hopefully, but we decide how we feel about what they did. And and then we learn a little bit about how we might feel about what we’re doing, or what we might do. And I’m, I’m really okay with it. Some people are gonna, I think everybody who reads it, is probably going to read a completely different book. And that is completely fine by me. So I don’t I don’t really have a dog in the race. You know, I have my own version that I wrote when I think it means it’s supposed to be an experience that book, it’s not a lecture, that is what the writing group did teach me in the end was it’s, it’s a story, it’s not a lecture. And people can refract that through their own lives and come up with a totally different image. And that is just really okay.

B&N: And experience might actually be the most powerful teacher any of us have. I’ve learned not to make the same mistake over again. But I may have had to lead with my chin more than once.

TW: I think we’ve all done that. I think that’s a strategy we’ve all employed.

B&N: But I think too, it’s also one or at least it’s why I read as well as so I can experience someone else’s perspective. And that’s something you’ve really been able to do. In this book. You’ve had classmates and roommates, who, roommates who got a very different Tara when you were at Brigham Young, you know, obviously, there’s the stuff of their family. But you had a couple of teachers that sort of steered you in the right direction. And people kind of showed up at the right moment. But do you have a favorite moment from the book or just a person that really you kind of think fondly every now and again?

TW: I have a lot. I think it’s another thing that saved me. Besides the singing besides a Pell Grant and college that made a huge difference in my older brother intervene in ways that I couldn’t have done without, I had a roommate in college, that when I was just borderline dysfunctional from PTSD, I remember there were nights that I would wake up, I didn’t even know what was wrong with me, because I didn’t know what PTSD was, I wake up like screaming in a cold sweat. And I remember she’d come into my room, she just hugged me, I felt like I was coming apart. And she was just like, holding me back together. Again, that’s incredible thing to do for a person. I mean, I had that bishop, but kind of Mormon equivalent of a pastor who, when I was going to quit school, don’t have money for a root canal tried to write me a check from his own account, because I wouldn’t take the church’s money. And then he’s the one who convinced me to apply for the Pell Grant that saved my life really, and professor who took time out of teaching to say you should really go to Cambridge. And when I said, Yeah, right, where am I going to get that kind of money, went through all the grants that you can apply for at BYU and called me and said, you can apply for these eight, I found them, you’re eligible for these ones. Another incredible thing to do. And he cobbled together the money that I could go and I took a little bit of a student loan out for that. But it wasn’t terrifying, you know? And, yeah, there’s so many people actually. And I would say my one bit of advice for people in difficult circumstances, is ask people for help. I think we have this idea that people hate to be asked for help. And some people probably do, but I think by and large people actually like, if somebody is good at something, and you know, someone’s really good at algebra or trigonometry. You ask them that people actually like explaining things. And we enjoy it. And I think asking for help. It’s, it’s not just okay, but people actually do like helping. It’s one of the great secrets people like to help. If you can come to terms with your own lack of invincibility, and turn to whoever is in your vicinity and say, I need help. You’re you’re going to be disappointed sometimes. But sometimes you’re not. And it might that might make the difference.

B&N: And Educated has clearly helped a lot of folks. It’s also been very thoroughly fact checked. And there are footnotes.

TW: That was fun.

B&N: Yeah, I can imagine. I bring that up. Because I think it’s really interesting that you’re talking about experience and perspective. And how that shifts between people and there a couple of stories of accidents that happen in your family. And at one point you’re saying, Well, no one remembers me being there, and someone remembered someone else. And, and this idea that memory isn’t perfect, but you kept your journals from when you were a teenager, which having been a teenage girl, I think that might be the most astounding piece. I don’t ever want to see any.

TW: It’s such torture reading your journals from when you’re 16 Oh, it’s the most torturous.

B&N: It’s horrible. Yeah. But you kept a detailed record. You were writing about meals you were writing about things that happened you were writing about moments and the landscape. What’s next though? For you, I mean, obviously, you don’t want to repeat of this book you want to stretch as a writer.
TW: Yeah, I just want to keep telling these stories over and over again. That’s my grand plan. No, just kidding. You know, I don’t know, that’s, I mean, I know what the immediate next thing is, but I don’t know what the next thing is after that. And I’ve been a slow mover. You know, it’s been four years since that book came out. And I was on a book tour for a long time. So I was part of it, but I had a lot of opportunities come out. And that’s what’s great. You have a success like this, you get all these opportunities. And initially, my reaction was, I have to do all of that I, oh, yeah, I’ll make a documentary. I should try TV show, I could post a podcast and you’re getting all the people are saying, why don’t you do this, why don’t you do this, and it’s really easy to just do all these things. And I said yes, to a ton of things, and then had to, you know, really awkwardly call everybody back and be like, actually, I think I’m going to do nothing. That’s what I’m going to do and realize not every opportunity actually has to be taken. And so I sort of siloed myself and did a lot of therapy and did a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, and a lot of studying and then a lot of recovering from the from the tour, which was pretty onerous. And, you know, what I’m working on now is what I what I’d mentioned a little bit earlier, which is that if educated is about making that decision to get out of a dysfunctional situation, then afterwards, you have to confront that emotional inheritance that you have, and you have to figure out, okay, how do I repair myself in such a way that I don’t keep recreating the situation. And that was something I took really seriously about two years after the book came out, recognizing I had these patterns, I was building that same life in New York, but I was like, I was still finding these people who were like not so different from my family. And realizing I’m gonna keep doing this the rest of my life if I don’t figure out what’s going on with me and stop it. And so that’s the current book is kind of dealing with that inheritance putting yourself back together what comes after you make the decision and so that I’m doing it because I really want to do it I’m kind of driven to do it almost in the same way I was driven with Educated, I can’t leave it alone. And no one’s asking me to do it,nobody came up to me and said you should really do this you know, came from inside so I trust it a little more. After that I have no idea you know, maybe I’ll disappear again for over 10 years and do absolutely nothing it’s really unclear what cuz memoirs have that weird thing where you know, you’re writing memoirs you’re not a fiction writer, you’re not a nonfiction writer you got to kind of carve out the space for yourself and right now I know was driving me, I know what I’m interested in. I know what I wake up thinking about, what I go to bed thinking about so I’m gonna write about that. But after that, I don’t know I might have to just go wait for something else to feel necessary again and I don’t know what that will be.

B&N: That all sounds great. Tara we cannot wait to see that book whenever it arrives. Paperback of Educated is just out now. Thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over.

TW: Thanks for having me.