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" I had a mental breakdown while doing my Ph.D. at Cambridge, soon after I cut off contact with my parents, and I started seeing the university counsellor, one of the best decisions I ever made. There's something very nourishing in setting aside an hour a week to talk. "

Tara Westover

Parents

Doing

Decisions

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" There was a lot of beauty in my childhoood. "

Tara Westover

Beauty

Lot

" Academic writing is such a different way of writing. "

" The things about my childhood that I really loved the most, writing about those things was hard because I knew they would never happen again. "

" When you write, you are alone. It can be a bit of a shock later to discover that people have read what you've written! "

" I hate the the word 'disempower,' because it seems kind of cliche, but I do think that we take people's ability to self-teach away by creating this idea that that someone else has to do this for you, that you have to take a course, you have to do it in some formal way. "

" When I came to Cambridge, I was involved in the ward for a little bit, but I did have a very gradual process of trying to work out what I thought a good life consisted of. "

" I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected. "

" Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one. "

" There is a certain panic, at least if you're raised Mormon, to being single at 31. But what they don't tell you is that it can also be kinda great. "

" I can't have my family in my life because they are abusive, and I don't have control over that. There is an abusive culture in my family, and I have to turn away from it. "

" I think reading an audiobook is a real skill - for one thing, you have to be able to do impressions and voices, which I cannot do - and it's just not a skill I have. "

" I had access to books, and I could read... but that more foundational, basic historical awareness, I didn't have any of that. "

Tara Westover

Awareness

Read

" I think it's a belief that you can learn something. That's something that I really value from the upbringing I got. "

" My family was, I think, a bit more radical than most Mormons, especially on the question of gender. So in my mind, growing up, there wasn't ever any question of what my future would look like. I would get married when I was 17 or 18. And I would be given some corner of the farm, and my husband would put a house on it, and we would have kids. "

" My brother once lit his leg on fire. And after, when the fire was finally out, his leg was covered in third-degree burns. And we made the decision - or my parents did - not to take him to the hospital but to treat that at home with a salve my mother made of comfrey and lobelia. "

" Forgiveness isn't just the absence of anger. I think it's also the presence of self-love, when you actually begin to value yourself. "

" I have a theory that all abuse, no matter what kind of abuse it is, is foremost an assault on the mind. "

" BYU was a really positive place for me. "

Tara Westover

Positive

Place

" Anger can be a good thing. It's a mechanism that your brain uses to get you out of situations that are bad for you. But in terms of leading a peaceful life, it is not very productive. "

" I think for people who are inside these relationships that are really hard to leave, there is always a compelling reason to stay. It's not that they are wholly bad people. "

" All my father's stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. "

" During my first semester of college, I raised my hand in a class and asked the professor to define a word I didn't know. The word was holocaust, and I had to ask because, until that moment, I had never heard of it. "

" They were a very good form for me - the way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to - and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have. "

Tara Westover

Way

Good

" An education is not so much about making a living as making a person. "

" I didn't read much in high school, maybe because I didn't go to high school. Instead, I worked. "

" Learning in our family was entirely self-directed. "

" Although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. I could stand with my family or with the gentiles... but there was no foothold in between. "

" Anyone who grows up reading the Bible for spiritual reasons, you get accustomed to reading things that are too much for you, too profound for you... Having that belief that you should read them anyway gives you a great advantage over people who only read what they think they can understand. "

" I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing. "

Tara Westover

Write

Writing

" Psychologically, when you hear something a number of times, you start to believe it. "