chinese, we are going to have to really get our act together. we are going to have to go through some very painful and very profound reforms. part of the reason i wrote trump versus china was to set the stage for people to have this conversation and to recognize that everything the president is doing which i think it's of right general direction, is about 10% of what we need to do it were ultimate going to be capable of competing with china. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website, booktv.org and search for newt gingrich or the title of his book using the box at the top of the page. >> [inaudible conversations] >> please welcome tara westover in conversation with doctor khoi le. [applause]

hello there. guess who i am. [laughing] so i am khoi le. this is tara westover, and if i have to give you an introduction about tara westover, you need to just get out of hope you've been living in for a while. because the book has to celebrate i think the 100th week, consecutive week on the "new york times" best seller list, it's at number one. [applause] ahead of michelle malcolm, down there so that's pretty cool. and i'm assuming a lot of people are familiar with the narrative that, the 40 so interested and you're still here on the last lecture on the second day, but i thought we would still go through some of her story because it's so gripping. it starts in idaho and actually to me it's like such a beautiful

setting. there must be a lot of beautiful memories you must have that. >> yeah, i mean, it was beautiful mountain that i grew up on. i still have really fond memories of being on that mountain and i love playing on that mound. i think it's an incredible, you know, for the kids to get to put on a playground, we had this entire farm and this huge space and just a lot of wonderful things that could happen on a mountain like that. i guess you would say we were the original free range kids, you know, kind of hard-core. so there was a lot of really wonderful things about it. then of course there was some difficult things but the setting, the scenery, living in the -- >> nature walks. >> you are just there all the time. you don't want to it. it's a constantly. one of the things when i'd come back from college and i'd be driving to town with my sister and i would just be rapturous

about how wonderful everything was. she was used to it. she is like what's up with you? if the field. there will another field right there. we have to take a picture of this. she would just roll her eyes. >> club time outdoors. her mother was an herbalist. >> and the midwife and so we grew a lot of food that we ate and we had animals that we raised. we had a pretty come with a herbalism and every we're pretty involved with the lead. >> a lot of different animals? >> mostly normal ones, you know. i guess we had goats, pigs. >> this is rancho mirage. like a poodle? [laughing] >> we never had a poodle, no. that never happened. normal farm animals i guess, horses, cows, takes, chickens. we had a lot of goats. we were goat people. what i think of as normal

animals. >> and you were the youngest of seven, so there's a lot of people around. >> yeah. i mean, we didn't go to school so my parents had kind of a different philosophy of a lot of things so they were opposed to a lot of things will see you take for granted. doctors and hospitals, they would not have liked you. >> the first school though -- >> my dad got a little more radical as he got older. my first three siblings went to school. >> more in hospitals. >> board and hospitals. as my dad get old he got more radical and he pulled up the kids out of school. my older brothers and after that starting with my third front i think is when it started everyone was born at home and my fourth brother after that come note birth certificates or anything like that. >> so no medical records or nothing? >> no. i got my birth certificate when i was nine. >> you are lucky you didn't look like me.

>> probably would've been hard. >> of documentation, that's a problem. [laughing] like you for many recent that you don't look like in the. [laughing] we will need that one for now. then, but you are still reading. i think there was like one reference to going to the carnegie library. >> there was a library and ten, a carnegie library and would go occasionally. reading was important to my parents so we all learned how to read. i was taught how to read by an older brother. i'm pretty sure it was to went out to limit brothers how fast i could read. one of my brothers thought i was dumb and thought i could not learn how to read. >> this was at age four. >> i think i was four. i learned how to repeat those important q could read so you could read the bible, book of mormon is, very religious. reading was important and in the rest of education was a little bit more piecemeal.

a bit more haphazard. some years my mother would say we're going to get very serious about schooling and that would last a couple weeks and that would tend to give way to the demands of her herbal business or the farm or my parents were very devoted to food supply. it was very anxious that he needed to have a ten year supply of food to prepare for whatever catastrophe was going to come at the end of time. >> since you with all the people of food yet to be able to protect the food. >> then you have to protect different from of the people who don't have food so it gets to be kind of evolved that kind of planning. >> ten ten years the food is a t of food. >> for nine people. you mentioned your father kind of evolved in his way of thinking, he went more towards -- was it during an event the

change the way he was viewing de world or was it just a progression? >> it's hard to say. there were definitely events that seem to play into it and intensify. i write about the effect of ruby ridge which is what i remember and that hit my family and a pretty specific way. i think my dad for many years before that was already pretty frightened of the federal government. it 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 that's the story of the federal government surrounding the family and essentially laying siege with them and killing several members of the family. >> and not so far from you. >> they were in idaho and they were homeschoolers like my family. i think for my dad that really solidified in his mind a lot of the fears, things that he was worried about.

i think that had a pretty intense that. i don't think anybody ever went after the ruby ridge incident where as a lot of my siblings did go to a couple of use school here or there. >> tyler, i guess he's the third oldest in the family. he felt the need to break free of that environment. >> he was really unusual. he was about, he went to one year of high school and ruby ridge happen and he didn't go back. he was just kind of a freak, you know? in a good way. but he went to a year of high school. he liked it. he liked math. he taught himself trigonometry and then he taught himself algebra, then he decided he would teach himself calculus but he didn't have books so they went to the high school and said when giving a calculus book? the calculus teacher just

laughed and said you can't teach yourself tyke u.s. pirg he said give me a book, i think i can. she gave him a a book and he taught himself calculus. one day just took the act, i think he got almost a perfect score. and then just announced he was going to college. i didn't even know what that was. i think i was probably eight, and at first i knew college was an evil terrible thing because that's what my dad said. any kind of left. >> the book is dedicated to tyler. your credit him with also introducing you to music, which you i think had said was one of the main source of inspiration for you to leave home and see something greater outside of your world. >> i was pretty happy with the mound, growing up on a mountain is kind of a wonderful thing. i don't think, i very much subscribed to my father worlds of you. when you're a kid you get told things, they make sense to you.

sorry, something is clicking back here. i very much subscribed to my dads we looking at the world and at the intention of ever leaving the mountain. that would work fine for me. tither played for me some opera and some mormon tabernacle choir and i was just really arrested by and thought i don't know what this is one thing that is clear to me is no one is born knowing how to sing like this. you have to go somewhere and then that the teacher to do this. i said to tyler, where'd you go to learn this? he said to go to college. i sort of said fine, i'll do that. i ended up saying how to get to college? you teach yourself math. [laughing] it's not that hard, don't worry. and so i tried it because he is like acting as if it was a very normal thing to do, and i did that teach myself calculus. i barely managed to teach myself enough algebra to just scraped

through that exam. i started waking up early and trying to learn algebra. it's a strange thing to try to explain to people but it is still true that i more or less thomas of algebra because i like to sing. that was the motivation for me. i don't know for sure what kind of lesson there is in that accept that i think maybe we should be a little thoughtful before he crushed any kind of passion that a child has because you just don't really know where that will take them. it was because i like to think that it went to college, when i got to college i discovered at byu i discovered philosophy and history and all these wonderful things and above that, with to cambridge and cambridge i discovered writing books and wrote a book and and i came tos place here. you just don't necessarily know where these things will take you but i think if you don't, you don't know where the path will take you but you know having no passion what they can or. >> you have that chapter called

apache women. >> i haven't read in a while. >> okay. it's really good. [laughing] i recommend it. you made this decision. you are 15 or 16 and i think you are being modest but you taught yourself and you got a score on the act a venture that got you into byu. you are preset and there's just one thing i read that you have read recently, but what your father comes into your room at night and he says, care, i pray about your decision to the road and just called to testify and he is displeased that you are casting away his blessings to or after man's knowledge and that

his wrath will come upon you. in the book you spend the night think about this and your father consensus to its pretty chilling and wake up the next day and you have decided not to go to college. >> yeah, i mean, i very much subscribed to my dad's worldview. mostly i just subscribed to it and then i did and that's going to college for all kinds of reasons, but even once i did go i think i still have to believe that i shouldn't go, that the something wicked about the fact i was going. my dad very much had a doctrine that we were taught that we were a peculiar people, my family specifically kind of took that from the old testament, because we didn't participate in all these things that other people did, that's doctors and public school was big part of that. so for me to go to college was a huge breach of that. i was of jew might for a long time. it felt like a sampling, a

personal failing that it didn't have enough faith or conviction to just stick out with this life that i've been told was a right life. the thing is it didn't feel like the right life for me. i think when you're a kid, i mean, kid, i guess i'm 17, but i did not reconcile those things. i owed something to my parents. i owned a loyalty to him and the red their beliefs, and i really felt like i owed them that. i felt like i also owed something to myself. i should explore this come about to sing, i want to see what enabled to do and it really want to do this. i could not reconcile those two obligations. there wasn't really a way to do. >> your mothers role is interesting because at times she encourages you and she says tara, you're the one i thought would get out of here so you need to go and not stay. other times it seems like she is

holding back a bit. >> my mother is complicated. whenever i think about my mom i always think about there are two versions of her. so there's my mother why think of as my mother, then there's my fathers wife. they are just not the same person. my mother is really different person when my dad is either there or she's kind of acting on his behalf. she is a very different person. when i was younger i feel like there was more of her as my mother, and then as i got older i felt like that person was less and less present. >> it was a little bit unpredictable which mother -- >> a little bit unpredictable. >> nature of mothers, nothing definite can be said. >> i don't quite think that's the quote but i but i can see u are reaching for. >> you go to college and you are finding out that all these things, that your knowledge is different than that from your classmates. so that's like what obstacle and

then you have social obstacle. even though in retrospect to say i'm at byu, that must be a little transition period it's not like going to berkeley or something like that. >> it seemed to me like a shockingly worldly party school, but i recognize now -- [laughing] that says a lot more about me than it does about byu. because it's more or less a mormon convent, like -- [laughing] more or less. like men and women live in different buildings, and there's a curfew that is at 12:00 at night and if you visit i guys apart but you can only be in the living room. you can't go even to the bathroom project to go to the bathroom in an apartment across the street that women on. it's serious, serious. i thought of the most terrifying -- people were wearing tank tops and drinking mountain dew. [laughing] i couldn't deal with it. no, i thought i was surrounded by gentiles. that was the language, the word

i used. >> aside from a focus on the academic obstacles that you have to overcome learning about all these things, the way you'd been taught, , and the social, but there's also financial obstacles. obstacles. it sounds like you were really broke a lot the first year. >> likely byu was not expensive because the church subsidize a lot of it. you could actually scraped through. tuition at the time i went was i think $1600 or something, which is unbelievable for the kind of education that it is. my read of never forget was when hundred ten dollars a month. and so you could do that. you could work a a couple jobsd work in the summer and you could do that. the only problem with doing it that way is you be constantly and initially preoccupied with money. you could have woken me up at 3:00 in the morning and just shook me awake and how it's when is your bank account? i could've told you to the

penny, like $26.57. i knew at any hour of the day houseman i had come always comd who wife on what. i knew all that. that takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth, for lack of a better term. activity are think about a focusing on everyday was money. the best thing happened to me that the public could happen to me is i need a root canal. it's not obvious why that such good thing but it was a good thing and mike is because i couldn't afford the root canal. i didn't have the money. it was like $1400. i didn't have it. i ended up going into talking to a bishop who is the moment equaled a pastor and you try to give me the churches church ist i been raised with this insane idea of independence. he tried to give me money from his own bank account which it wouldn't take and any after weeks and weeks and weeks and it's me to apply for a pell grant, which is a whole other complicated thing for me to do, government and i thought it was the illuminati but eventually i

got this check for four grand and there was $4000 because account in the spring and it gave me for the fall and i just stared at it. >> all you need was 1400. >> i called the woman, i called the number and said i don't need all of this. can you take some of it back? she thought that i lost -- i think she thought i was prank calling her. she's used to people not getting enough money saying i was supposed to get more and i would say i was supposed to get less. she is like i don't have time for whatever this is. so she just said it's your problem. i cashed it and i paid for the tooth to get fixed and about my books and i paid all my rent for the semester and i had a thousand dollars left over. it was the first time i had anything like that. i guess it's the first time i experienced what i now think of to be the most powerful think

about money, the most powerful event you get with my is you can think about that are not many. if you have a lot of money and you're still thing about my all time you are probably doing it wrong. >> that you describe as freeing you to finally be a student to learn. >> i could actually take classes. i could focus on things besides the fact that much money i had come out i could work or could i so plasma to make my rent payment. i could stop thinking about all that stuff, and so i could actually take classes that i did need to take. one of the classes i took was psych 101 what you did need. i had i have master orbits but i thought i'll take a psychology class whatever that is. i enrolled literally in psych 101 which i think is probably every parents nightmare. that the kid will take psych 101 and then come home and psychoanalyze them, which is exactly what happened. but to me that class was

incredibly important to me. i had no concept of mental illness until i took the class, and it was -- >> you felt like there was something to recognize. >> the professor started lecturing us on paranoia and schizophrenia, paranoia and the whole and is explained at all and he's got a powerpoint and his movie and i just wrote in my nose, like this is my dad. like, he's describing dad. that's when you start talking about would be rich, and a diversion of the stories that were slightly different from the one i grew up with, just a little bit. it just, i don't know if my that is why polar. we will never know because ironically one of the symptoms if he has is that kind of paranoia means he will never see a doctor for it. i do is just a whole new lands to which 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, was never something that was clear to me or why when we are injured we did go to the doctor and a lot of questions that i had that i just didn't have an attitude answer to or the answers i had were kind of tough. at that explanation was really helpful for me. >> you're in the state of my now where you had the money and the freedom to learn more. you had been woken to the fact a lot of things you were taught were not true. in some ways is almost an advantage that you assumed you know nothing in the way -- a lot of high school students, common pleas and believe they were taught and it's hard to know what to let go of. you describe like letting go of everything assuming that everything was different. it's like a clean slate. does that create a hunger or thirst for more knowledge?

>> possibly. maybe there's a slight hunger that came out of it or maybe you could describe hunger is a flattered way to describe it. sometimes what i tell people he got a phd but i don't have a high school diploma. a little overcompensating. took it a little far. you can call it hunger. that sounds nicer. >> and insatiable hunger. >> insatiable thirst. i don't know. there were a lot of things i didn't know but had ideas about things, just a lot of them were wrong. i thought i knew think. i wasn't aware of my own ignorance until i became aware of my own ignorance when he learned about civil rights movement, and that was the first time that i thought oh crap, i don't know anything. >> specific -- >> stuff that i knew was wrong. >> the movement in general? >> i had grown up hearing about slavery but i but i heard a wed

version of that. really not good. i had grown up with it, not good. i attended the class and then we did a section on slavery, and i have seen images on the time, some of the famous photos that you see from the time or read accounts or we had seen a sketch of a slave auction. it was clear to me, i thought this isn't really, when dad told us about this, this is not what i imagine. it still fit probably within a story that he told, so that's okay. and then a few weeks go by, they came back in the class and he was talking about this thing called civil rights movement and i didn't know what that was. he put this picture up on of the woman and he said she has been arrested for taking a seat on the buster trip i thought she meant he had been -- should been arrested for stealing the seat. which it's kind of an

unfortunate misunderstanding, to take a seat or to take that seat. it's like, i was still time to figure out like how did she get it loose? [laughing] like, i grew up in the jakarta. i took apart a lot of -- i had decided would be involved in getting a a bus seat out of the bus because we've done it before. and i think, that's not really a casual tuesday afternoon activity. >> you got enough of the of the questions right because you ended up graduating as a top student in history in your group. isn't that true? >> top student -- they voted me on something. i don't think at the top gpa i thought you are like the top history student or something like that. >> i think i was something, i can't remember what i was. i didn't want out. >> you went to cambridge on a scholarship which is quite like about scholarship except road scholarship goes to oxford. pretty big honor.

seems like your parents are kind of proud of this and your father is saying it looks like the home schooling paid off. >> yes. he did. he liked that way until i get. [laughing] >> you go to cambridge and you are exposed to more ideas and you write about berlin. i don't think we need to go into that in our time but it sounds like it's a cambridge that you realize you have narrative that is interesting to the people. is that when you can start talking about your childhood? >> i guess all of it towards the end. i was still pretty secretive about the whole thing, and when the book came out i had good friends of mine called it to say wait, what? because i just have talked to them about any of it. they can knew i was homeschooled but i just had a very clean, safe version of that that i

told. part of it was just at byu, the few times i had told somebody, i don't like being the outsider in that way, and you don't like being the one person that doesn't mean you think are doesn't know what's going on, doesn't know what an exam is, doesn't know what the holocaust is, doesn't understand wife rosa parks the stealing bus seats. it's not always pleasant so stunned that kept to myself. i had a few professors who said you should write about this and i thought why? what's the point of it? i didn't have a good sense of what the point of it was. and then i think i went through this tremendously difficult process of my samurai became estranged from a few members of my phone because they were becoming more radical and i was becoming more mainstream. after i went through that process i started thinking maybe there's a reason to write this. maybe there's reason to do. i don't know if there is for sure but i will experiment.

>> main reason you want to write is to put the story out? are other people in a similar situation? >> there is the reason you're writing, a reason you tell yourself you're writing which is not always the same. i had thought there might be a reason to write. i thought i was going to write about education, i write about my education. was strange. i'll write about these really important things i've learned about in the process of learning and i thought it would be a useful thing to write about,, education. i thought somehow i could write an entire book about education and not mention my family. i have no idea how i thought that would go but but i convind myself that was possible. >> there's so much about your story and people are fascinated with your journey. there's not enough -- i read this book when it first came out. i read it again when our means bookclub joseph about hugo and the read it again in my

hospital. >> you have read it more than i have. >> after you read the first time, the first time, the first on your flipping the pages because you had to find out what's going on and stuff but the next two times i read it i was really moved by the language, and i wondered if you could just read to make paragraphs because i'd like to give the audience just a sample of your voice as, your writing voice and there are two here that i've marked. >> effect landscape passages for you. which is everyone's favorite. okay. this is about idaho. the hill is paid with wild beat. if the conifers and sagebrush our syllabus, the wheatfield is of course a ballet. each stem following all the rest in burst of movement, a million ballerinas bending one after the other as great gales did their golden heads. the shape of that did last only a moment, and this is as close

as anyone gets to seeing the wind. there's a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation even if dominion in that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours afloat on pipe and brush and rock. it's a tranquility for the sheer immensity. it calms with this very magnitude which renders them an of no consequence. >> thank you. [applause] >> so clearly your writing this as first language but what -- it's hard to imagine writing so beautifully but not coming to really books until you're in college. you must have had some -- >> i grew up with the bible, and the bible has, you know, linguistically, politically and

every other way, narratively. not every single word is gold, but there's incredibly beautiful writing i think in the bible. i had grown up with that and i grown up with storytelling and i had grown up with that kind of literary ethical tradition that it wasn't, it wasn't as the language was completely foreign to me. it was for to be the idea i would have provided was incredibly for an strange. >> that's a different kind kind of writing that academic writing which is what you are doing at cambridge. >> they are almost diametrically opposed to each other. what it takes to write a good academic article you want to say everything is almost directly possible. you wanted to be totally plain and i think that's kind of the kiss of death in storytelling actually. you actually want to build and live it more complexity. you want to let people see the

scene and come to the own conclusions. that's a great risk i think of storytelling especially about your own life. if you write a book that is about your life but is experiential and essential putting people in the scene, they will have that experience as if it happened to them in a way and then they might come to a different conclusion than you do about your life, and that's a strange kind of gamble to take, but i think better than an essay this has here, i'm going to rebut this person and here's what her to limit is and here's what it all means. people might process that but i don't think they are going to think through it and more portly come to a conclusion that is really, really going to move them or stay with them. they have to experience it. i did decide to write the book. it's not an essay. it's not an argument. it's just a story and anybody can go through that story as they can come up with a whole

lot of different -- i get all kinds of people come up to me at my book events and all kinds of different takeaways from the story. some people say i'm so glad, irreconcilable cache of reconciliation with you and your pet is right round the corner. some people said so glad you will never see those people again. one right after the other. in both cases i just kind of smile and say thank you. because i know it has nothing to do with me. it's got everything to do with them and what they need to hear and think about and what of the puzzles their wrestling with in the own lies. that's the point of the story it should be that. that's exactly what it should be. >> but you did write it for yourself in some ways, no? >> i think i time to make sense of it. i think i time to figure out fundamentally, i think i can figure out if i was a good person. i wasn't sure i was. i had done something that in my own mind was unthinkable, which

is i had written to my parents and the said i love you but i needed to be the case that we don't talk or see each other very much. because i just need a break. does the word for that. it's called estrangement. i couldn't have called at the time. i just said i just need space. i felt terrible for doing that. i felt like it was the ultimate inexcusable thing. you are just not about to do that. you were just -- if you do that it's because you're terrible person. i really believed it. and yet i didn't have any other choice, at least i can see one. i've been trying to have a peaceful relationship with my family for as long as i could remember. it just wasn't happening for me. so i think a lot of the reason i put the book was just to answer that question. >> did you answer it? did you get some resolution? >> i think it helped. it helped me, it seems to help me see the -- the choices that

would punish ourselves most for other choice but really didn't have any choice at all. writing it out, i realized there really wasn't another path. like this was the path. the one path. it's helping make peace with where it ended up. revising its network and would've chosen to end up. i never would have wanted that ending, but that it was probably the best in the end was anything i could live with. i could still love my parents. it's not like i stop loving them. them. it was just the case that this was the form that love had to take for a while. >> sometimes you do therapy where you're right or you figure things out and it's nice and you have a, create a narrative that really is helpful. and then you can't put it down and you move on with things. we're not letting you move on. we're kind of like drag you out and make you talk about this over and over for 100 weeks. >> that is a true yeah, thanks.

[laughing] >> know, a good friend of mine -- >> it was his idea. >> a good friend of mine wrote a beautiful book about a difficult thing that happened to her family at the asteroid before i came out, which writing a book therapeutic? she said, you know, writing the book is terribly therapeutic. pushing about if not. that was true. >> in your family of nine, seven of you and then your parents, you have four that have different names. anybody else's names, you contacted a wood and said username or they don't want their name. was there ever a consideration -- you are still tara westover and is easy to figure who your parents are. did you ever consider publishing it under someone else's name? >> i did think about that. my understanding is with a more that's pretty tricky.

if you're going to -- i think you could publish it as a novel, which i really did think about. i thought about just think it's a novel. but then there were two problems with calling it a novel. the first one is no one would have believed it because it's too weird. i told one my brothers when a cold one of my brothers opposite hey, , i'm going to write about our family. there was really long pause on the other line and he said, well, you won't have to make anything up. [laughing] and so really i genuinely thought if i write this as a novel it's just no one will believe it. it's just too weird. i can't do that. that was the first recent but the second reason is a little more serious witches when i went to the typical process with my family, i think like a lot of other people who are struggling with estrangement or typical families, what you really feel is kind of isolated from people. it feels like a the only person that's ever had this problem. i remember thinking to myself,

ical could anybody think i'm a good person if they know that my mother doesn't think i'm a good person? because my parents at the time were saying i was possessed. they really believed that i left their faith and if at the recent that i was possessed, and i just thought how can anybody ever trust me again given this reality? once i had a little distance from that, it just seems really important that it was going to write this story and say this happened, that it need to have happen to a real person, and it needed to happen to someone who would stand up and say it happened to me, this is my story, , and mib your story, it might have elements of your story but it happened to real person and the person is me. it felt like a lot of the point of doing that would be blunted if you couldn't, if you are fictionalizing it and standing behind a fiction. i boldly decided to do what he could to protect privacy and

keep people as much space as a good but at that moment i have to write it under my own name. >> with fiction characters often get two-dimensional, and here you labor so hard and uses successful showing complexity. enables company relationship is with your brother sean, and you show so many things that he does with you that are so loving, and you talk about him breaking courses for you, saving your life on a runaway horse at great risk to himself. your father tried to get you to work with this thing called this thing called the sheer. osha would be all over that and sean says if you were to make astute i'm going to do it and not tara. he really loves you and puts himself in harm's way for you but yet is also the source of a lot of your pain. >> it's something i want to try to describe for both people have

experienced that and people who happen. sometimes we talk about dysfunctional or abusive relationships i think we are so focused on the negative. what we're discarding may not be recognizable to the people who are experiencing those relationships, and i remember when i was 16 i was at my grandmother sounds under watched some hallmark movie, i can't member what it was but i remember -- grandmother's house. it had a violent relationship and and i remember i was driving home. i was really young and i was trying to help remember there was a moment i had this thought, i wonder if my relationship with sean is abusive. i said no, because that guy in the movie was always wearing like a wife beater shirt and always drunk. every scene he was in he was a caricature of a monster and i thought that's what they look like, that's what it looks like and that's not what sean is like. except for a tiny percentage of the time, and the absolute is like that. in my mind i thought if someone

is not like that all the time, then it's fine. it was something i want to try to capture for people, is part of what makes those relationships are compelling and what makes it so hard to leave, is that the love is real, that often genuinely loving compelling people who need help or whatever, but at some point you have to kind of ask the hard question of who can help this person? if the answer is no, how do i take care of myself in that situation? i felt like i had to write about the relationship with i experienced it, which was not completely white or black, which is what made ultimately very difficult to walk away from. >> one of the few times we really talk about your father being consistently proud of you is when you start singing in public. there's one line i think is so

ironic and you explain the things he doing and you said he wanted my voice to be heard. obviously your voice is heard now. >> he may or may not have had that in mind. >> but i wonder if you would let us hear the voice that your father had in mind and saying something for us? >> i can do that. i always saying i him. i hope you like hymns. i've had to member the first -- i haven't sung it in a while. okay, i got it. ♪ oh, lord, my god ♪ when i in awesome wonder ♪, sit along the world thy hands have made ♪ ♪ i see the stars

♪ i hear the rolling thunder, thy power throughout the universe displayed ♪ ♪ then sings my soul, my savior god, to the ♪ ♪ how great thou art, how great thou art ♪ ♪ then sings my soul, my savior god, to thee ♪ ♪ how great thou art, how great thou art ♪ ♪

[applause] >> thank you very much. >> thank you. wonderful. >> that was really fun. look, we have time to spare. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> tonight on booktv in prime time, technology reporter recalls her experiences working for tech startups in san francisco. on c-span's "the communicators." it's a discussion on the future of technology at how the internet is used in political campaigns. ..