thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> here's what's coming up on the tv. we lead off with care westover at the rancho mirage book festival. she is interviewed about her memoir, educated which tells a struggle to reconcile for her desire to get an education with her family ideology and isolated life as survivalist in idaho. after that maximizing and is booked "by chance alone", a memoir about his imprisonment at auschwitz. then cassie chambers about the women of appalachia who raised her from property turning to ivy league degrees, her book is titled hill women. >> please welcome tara westover and conversation with doctor

lee. [applause] >> hello there, guess who i am. this is tara westover and i have to give you an introduction about tara westover, you need to get out of the hole that you have been living in. because her book is just celebrated the 100 week, consecutive week on the new york times bestseller list. number one. [applause] [cheering] ahead of michelle malcolm, down there. that is very cool. thank you. i'm assuming a lot of people are familiar with the narrative and that's where your still here on

the last lecture of the second day. i thought we would still go through some of her story because it's so gripping and the starts in idaho and to me it is such a beautiful setting, there must be a lot of beautiful memories that you still have. >> it was a reallyy beautiful mountains that i grew up on and i still have fond memories of being on the mount and playing on the mountain. some people like to plane playground, we had an entire farm in a huge space and a lot of wonderful things that can happen on a mountain like that. we were free range kids, kind hard-core. so there was a lot of wonderful things. of course there was difficult things to but the setting and

scenery --in >> it's not even nature walks, years there all the time, you don't want to it's there constantly. one thing when i would come back from college and driving to town and my sister i would be rapture that how well everything was. i was cf to get a picture and she rolled her eyes. >> your mom spent a lot about time outdoors. >> we grew a lot of food that we ate and we had animals that we raised the move from pastor pasture and we were pretty involved with the land. >> what animal. >> mostly normal ones. we had goats, pigs. >> this is rancho mirage, so normal animals. [laughter] -- >> we never had a poodle now.

that never happened. normal farm animals, horses, cows, pigs, chickens, we had a lot of goats, we were go people. what i think of as normal animals. >> you the youngest of seven so there's a lot of people around. >> , we did not go to school, my parents had a different philosophy of a lot of things sd they were opposed to a lot of things, they would not have liked you. [laughter] >> my dad got a little more radical as he got older. my first three siblings went to school. >> they were born in hospitals and then as my dad got older he got more radical and he pulled the kids out of school, my older brothers and after that, my

third brother is when it started everyone was born at home in my fourth brother after that, no birth certificate or anything like that. >> no medical records, nothing. >> no i got my birth certificate when i was nine. >> you lucky you did not look like me. >> it would've been harder. >> no documentation that the problem. [laughter] >> lucky for many reasons you don't look like me and will leave that one for now. but you are still reading, i think there's one point to the library. >> there was a library in town, community library and we would go occasionally and reading was very important to my parents. i was taught how to read by my older brother and to win a bet with another one of my brothers how fast i could learn in one of my brothers thought it was dumb and could not learn how to read.

>> this is the age a for. >> so i learned how to read, it was important you could read c could read the bible, the book of mormon very religious. reading was really important. the rest of education was piecemeal and the little bit more haphazard and some years my mother would say were going to get serious about school and that would last a couple of weeks and give way to thesa demands of herbal business or the farm where my parents were very devoted to food supply so they needed to have a tenure supply of food to prepare for whatever catastrophe was going to come at the end of time. >> and then if you had the freebie had to protect his. >> yes protective from the other people so it gets involved in not planing. >> ten years of food is a lot of food, not like a little bit of

food. >> after nine people. you meant to do father evolved in his wayhe of thinking or he went more -- was there an event that changed the way he was viewing the world or just a progression? hard to say, they were definitely events that seem to play and intensify. i read it about the. reporter: ridge which is i remember that hit my family in a specific way for my dad who many years before that was already pretty frightened of the federal government in developing pretty radical ideas around government and school and doctors and thing like that. i think. reporter: ridge for him solidified that because that's the story of the federal government surrounding a family and essentially killing several

members of the family. >> not far from you. >> no, they were in idaho and homeschoolers. >> the weavers, for my dad that solidified in his mind a lot of the fears. so i think that had an intense effect. i don't think i ever h went to school after the. reporter: ridge incident and a lot of my siblings did go to couple years of school here and there but after that nobody went to any school. >> the third oldest, he felt the need to break free of the environment. >> he was a really unusual, he went to one year of high school and then. reporter: ridge happened and he did not go back. he was kind of a freak. [laughter] 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, he did not have books we went tt the high school and said will you give me a calculus book in a calculus teacher just laughed, you cannot teach herself calculus. andy said give me a book. >> she gave him a book and then one day he got almost a perfect score onat the act and then announced twos going to college, i didn't know who that was, i was probably eight in college was an evil terrible thing. then he just kind of left. and introducing you to music which is one of the main source inspiration to leave home and see something greater outside of your world.

>> i was happy with the mountains, growing up in the mountains is apy wonderful thing and i don't think ig very much subscribe to my father's world, when your kid you get told things that make sense to you. so i rented it to skype for my didad. i know intention of leaving, then tyler played opera and i was reallyy arrested by and thought i don't know what this is but one thing is clear no one is born how in to sing like this, you get to go somewhere and they teach you how to do this. i said tyler ready go to learn this, he said you go to college. and i said fine, i will do that. so i ended up saying how to get to college, they said you teach herself math.

[laughter] >> i tried it because he was acting like it was normal to do. and i did not keep myself calculus, i barely managed to keep myself algebra is great to the exam. but i learned algebra and is a strange thing to explain that is still true, i more or less taught myself algebra because i like to sing, that was the motivation for me. i don't know for sure what kind of lesson there is but i think maybe we should be a little anyghtful before we crush passion that a child has, you don't know where that will take them because i like to sing i went to college when i got to college i discovered philosophy and history and all the wonderful things and i look back and went to cambridge in cambridge i discovered writing in books and i wrote books then

i came to this place here. [laughter] 's was nice of you -- it you don't know where these things are going to take you but if you don't know where your passion will take you but you know having a passion -- >> you have the chapter called apache women. >> i think it's apache women. i've not read in a while. >> it is really good. i would recommend it. i hear the audio is good to. >> i am not listen to it, i heard it's h good. >> you made the decision 15 or 16 to think the being modest that you taught yourself encounter score on the act that got you into byu and you're pretty set -- there's one thing i read that you have not, where your father comes into your room at night and he says tara i . to the lord about your decision in

these call me too testify in these displeased that your casting away the blessings to hoard after man's knowledge. in his raft will come upon you. and in the book is spend the night thinking about this in any go the next day and you decided not to go to college. >> i subscribe to my dad's worldview, mostly i just subscribe and then i did end up going to college for all kinds of reasons but even once i did go i still think i believed i should've gone were the fact that i was going my dad had a doctrine that we were taught that we were per kill your people, my family specifically took them from the old testament because we did not participate

in all these things that other people did like doctors and public schools, they cover that. so for me too go to college was a huge piece. it felt like a feeling, personal feeling that i did not have enough faith to stick out with this life that i'd been told was the right life but the thing is, it did not feel like the right life for me. and i think when your kid, i guess i was 17 but i did not know how to reconcile. i owed something to my parents and over loyalty and their way of life and belief and i felt like i told them that and then i felt like i owed something in myself i should explore this, i want to see what i'm able to do and i really want to do this. i could not reconcile the two obligations.

there was not a way to do. >> your mother's role in this is interesting because the time she encourages you and said tara you're the one i thought would get out here so you need to go. and not stay approved in other times it seems like she's pulling back from that. >> my mother's complicated, when i think about my mom i think two versions of her. as my mother way think of as my mother and then my father's wife. and they're not the same person. my mother is a a really differet person when my dad is there or she's acting on his behalf, she is a very different person. when i was younger i felt like there is more of her as my mother but as i got older that person was less and less prese present. >> it was unpredictable which mother. >> a little bit unpredictable. >> the nature of mothers, nothing deficit can be said.

>> i see what you're reaching for. [laughter] >> you go to college and you're finding out that your knowledge is really different from that of your classmates. then you have social obstacle, even though if they said is not going to berkeley. >> it seems a worldly party school but i l recognize now tht says a lot more about me than other people. because it's more or less a mormon convent. [laughter] like men and women live in different buildings and there's a curfew that's 12:00 o'clock at night, if you visit a guys apartment you can only be in the living room, you cannot even go to the bathroom, you have to go into the bathroom and apartment across the street that women own. it's a serious -- i thought it s was the most terrifying, people

will ranked tank tops and jerky mountain dew. i cannot deal with it, i was surrounded by gentiles. >> there is a focus on the academic obstacles if you have to overcome that all these things were not awaiting your been taught and social, but there's also financial. it sounds like you're broke a lot of your first year. >> luckily byu is not expensive. because the church subsidizes a lot of it. you could scrape there. i think tuition the time i went was $1600 or something. which is unbelievable for the education and is. in my rent was $110 a month. so you could do that, you could work a couple jobs and work in the summer and do that.

the only problem you'd be constantly preoccupied with money. you could've woken me up at 3:0d said how much money is in your bank account i could've told you to the penny, $26.57. i knew at any hour of the day how much money i had who was coming in and when rent was due and all that. and that takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth for lack of a better term, everything i was thinking about and focusing on was money. the best thing happen that probably could've happened i needed a root canal, is not obvious why that's a good thing but it was a good thing because i could not afford i did not have the money and it was $1400. so i went in and talked to a bishop who is the equivalent of the pastor and he tried to give me the churches money but i've been raised with an insane idea of independence i would notot te

it then he tried to give me his own money from his own bank account which i would not take an after weeks he convinced me too apply for a program. which whole other complicated thing for me too do with the government and there was a lot of things going on. eventually i got the check for four grant and there was $4000 i got in the spring and i stared at it. >> all i needed was 1400. >> i called the woman and said i don't need all this, can you take some back and she thought i had lost -- i think she's so used to saying i was supposed to get morgan less and for whatever this is. cash or not, it's your problem. so i cash it and a pay for my tuition and got my books and paid the rent then i had a few

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 thingas ulabout money you can think abot things that are not money. if you have a lot of money and still think about money all the time you're probably doing it wrong. >> 's was trying to free you to be a student to learn? >> yes i take classes and focus on things besides how much money i had how many hours i work, so plasma, i had to stop think about all thatd stuff. so i can actually take classes that i did not need to take in one class i took was psych 101 which i did not mean, i admit the requirements but i thought maybe i'll take a psychology class whatever that is. so i'm enrolled in psych 101

which i think is probably every prince nightmare. that their kid will take psych 101. and then come home and analyze them. which is exactly what happens. but to me that class was incredibly important. i had no concept of mental illness until i took the class. >> you for like there's things you recognize. >> yes the professor went through all the symptoms and paranoia,re delusion, he's explaining that all and it was wrote in my notes, this is my dad. that's when they started talking about. reporter:g ridge in the version of story that was slightly different than the one that i watched.

i don't know if my dad is bipolar, will never know but ironically b a symptom is a paranoia meaning he'll never see a doctor. but it was a whole new lens which i look at my childhood and understand what had happened, other explanation why we were allowed to go to school or why we had so many injuries was never something that was clear or why we were injured we will go to the doctor. there's a lot of questions that i had that i did not have an answer to or answers of a handwork in tough and the explanation was really helpful for me. >> you're in this mind where you have the money and freedom to learn more and you been woken to the fact that a lot of things you talk were not true. in some ways is not an advantage that you assume nothing because a lot of things come in they still believe in things they were taught and it's hard to let

go. but if you describe the lingo of everything and assume everything is different, it's like a clean slate, does not create a home for thirst. >> possibly may be a slight hunger that came out of it or you could describe hunger is a flattering way to describe it, sometimes i tell people have a phd but it'll have a high school diploma. it's a little bit of overcompensating. but you can call hunger that sounds nicer. >> there were a lot of things it did not know but i had ideas about things just a lot of them were wrong. i thought i knew, i was not aware of my own ignorance until he became aware of my own ignorance went out was trying to win the civil-rights movement,

that was the first time that i thought, i do not know anything. >> and nothing that i know now is wrong. >> was it -- i heard about slavery in a word version of that which is not good. [laughter] i attended the class and redo the section on slavery in 19 famous photos that you see from the time or that account or we have seen a sketch of the slave auction. it was clear, i just love this is not what dad told us, is not what i imagine. a few weeks went by and i came

back to class and he was talking about the civil rights movement and i did not know what that was and he put the picture up of a woman and said she's been arrested for taking a seat onn the bus. and i thought he meant she should been arrested for stealing without steve. >> it's unfortunate misunderstanding. i'm still trying to figure out how did she get loose. [laughter] i grew up in a junkyard and took apart a lot of things, we've done it before but -- that's not usually. >> you got enough of the other questions right. >> a top student, they voted me on something, i don't know if it was a gpa.

>> equivalent to oxford and cambridge. pretty big honor and it seems like your parents are proud of this and your father saying you look like the homeschool is paid off. [laughter] >> he did. he likes that way of telling them. >> you go to cambridge and you're exposed tod more ideas ad you read about isaiah berlin and i don't think we need to go into all that with her time butha it sounds like cambridge that you realize you have a narrative set that is interesting to other people. can you talk about your childhood. >> i guess a little bit toward the end, i was still pretty secretive about the whole thing

and when the book came out i had good friends call me and say what because i never talk to them about any of it. >> they knew that i was homeschooled but they just think that i've a clean version of that that i told. a big part of it is byu and you don't like being outsider in that way and you don't like being the one person that doesn't know anything, doesn't know was going on or what the holocaust is, my kids are not always pleasant. it's something i've kept to myself, i had a few professors the same maybe you should write about this and i thought why, what's the point. and then i think i went true tremendously difficult process.

>> maybe there is a reason to do it, i'm'm not sure but all experiment. >> there's a reason you are writing and the reason you tell yourself you are writing. i had thought there might beho a reason to write, i thought i would write about education. all right about education, strange, all right about the important things that i learned about in the process of learning, it'll be useful to write about. i thought somehow i could write an entire book about my education and not family m. but i convinced myself that that is possible. >> there's so much about your

story and people are fascinated with your journey. i read this book when it first came out, i read it again when our means book club chosen a year ago and then i road again with my residence of the hospital. and after you read it, the first time you just looking at pages because you haven't found out was going on but the next one i was really moved by the language is always wondering if you could read to progress because they want to give the audience a voice of you and there's to hear that i marked. >> you picked landscape passages for you which is everyone's favorite. >> this is about idaho. the hill is paved with wild wheat, if the sage brushes

soloist that we feel is a core of l.a., each stem falling all the rest and movement a million ballerina sending one after the other. great gals spend their golden heads, the shape of that last only a moment and as close as anyone gets to seeing wind. >> there's a sense of summer to the comes from life on a mountain the privacy and isolation in the vast space you can say lived here for hours, it's a tranquility for this year which renders no consequence. >> thank you. [applause] >> so your writing this as a first language. what i think of that, it's hard

to imagine writing so beautifully but not coming to books until you're in college, you must've had some experience. >> i have the bible and the bible has a linguist and not every single word is gold. but there's incredibly beautiful in the bible. i grew up with on a group with him being good wambiguity, i th. >> academic writing which you are doing. >> i understand that almost diametrically opposed. i think what it takes to write an academic anyone to say

everything directly as possible and you wanted to be totally plain, that's a case of death and storytelling actually. if you actually want to building a little bit more complexity and let people see the scene and come to their own conclusion, that's a great risk of storytelling especially your own life. if you write your own and pulling people in the seems, they will have the experience, this is happened them in a way and they might come to a different conclusion than you do about your life and that's a strangeco gamble to take but i think better than an essay, censure here here's what her dilemma is and what it all means. people might process that but i don't think they're going to think through it and more importantly feel through it and come to a conclusion that is going to move them or stay with

them, they have told experiences. so i wrote the book and it's not an essay, it's on an argument it's just a story. everybody can go through the story and come upy with differf people come up to me and all kinds of different takeaways from the story. in some people with sam so glad and i just know reconciliation with you andso your parents is right around the corner. . .an . some say i'm so glad you'll never see those people again. [laughter] it in both cases i smile and say thank you because it has nothing to do with me it has everything to do with them and what they need to hear and think about and that's the point of the story. it should be that exactly what it should be. >> you did write for yourself in some sense?

>> i was trying to make sense of it. i was trying to figure out fundamentally i have done something in my own mind that was unthinkable which i had written to my parents and said i love you >> i couldn't call it that at the time but i just needed space bar go i felt terrible for doing that i felt it was the ultimate on excusable thing that you're just not allowed to do that. and yet i didn't have any other choice i've been trying to have a peaceful relationship with my family for as long as i can remember it just wasn't happening for me.

so the book was to answer that question. >> did you get some quick. >> it helped me see that sometimes the choices that we make we punish ourselves the most for are the choices we didn't have a choice at all. writing it out i realized there really wasn't another path. there was just the one path me realizing that's not where it i would have chosen or that ending but it's probably the best ending and the ending i was meant to have i can still love my parents i didn't stop loving them. >> but as you figure things

out but then you put it down and move on. we are not letting you move on we make you talk about this over and over. [laughter] >> that is true. thinks. [laughter] a good friend wrote a beautiful book and said was that therapy and she said riding a book is terribly therapeutic publishing it is not. that is true. >> in your family of nine you have for that have different names.

without consideration. did you ever consider publishing under someone else's nameer quick. >> i thank you could publish it as a novel but i thought about saying it is a novel but then there are two problems. first bill one would have believed it. it is too weird. when i called one of my brothers and said i'm going to write about ourle family, mmr there is a real long pause and then he said you won't have to make anything up. [laughter] so i genuinely thought if i write it as a novel nobody would believe it. is just too weird. butha the second reason is that

when i went to the process ofmo my family i feel there's other people dealing with this one - - and strange mentor difficult families you feel isolated and it feels like you're the only person that ever had this problem. i remember thinking to myself howt could anybody think i'm a good person if my mother doesn't think i'm a good person. because my parents that i was nuts they thought i was possessed i left their faith. so how could anybody trust me again cracks that this really happen to a real person and somebody who can stand up to say this is my story brick what might be your story or elements of your story but that person is me and it just

felt like and to fictionalize it. then to give people privacy and then to write under my own name. >> but to get two-dimensional but the most complicated relationship is with your brothers. and there are so many things that your brother does that is so loving. he breaks horses for you, saving your life at great risk to himself. your father tries to get you to work with the sheer. >> that was fun.

>> he says if you make us do it and i will do it and not tara. he really loves you and puts himself in harms way for you but yet also the source of a lot of your pain . >> i wanted to try to describe for people that have not experienced that but sometimes talking about dysfunctional or abusive relationships we are so focused on theme negative that what we are describing may or may not be recognizable to those that experience that relationship. when i was at 16 i was atng my grandmother's i watched a hallmark movie with a dysfunctional violent relationship. i was on my way home and there was a moment i had a thought i wonder if my relationship with sean is abusive. than i thought no because the guy in the movieie always had a wife beater in always drunk.

everything he was in was a caricature of the monster so i thought that's what it looks anke. sean isn't like that except for a tiny percentage of the time then absolutely he is like that. a but i thought east is not like that all the time then he is fine. so i wanted to capture that's what makes those relationships so compelling and it makes it so hard to believe that often genuine loving compelling people at some point you have to ask the hard question. can i help this person and if the answer is no then how do i take care of myself quick. >> and had to write about it the way i experienced it which is not white or black which made it very difficult to walk away from.

>> one of the few times talk about to be consistently proud there is one line i think it is so ironic you said he wanted my voice to be heard and it is now. >> you may not have had that in mind. [laughter] >> let us hear your voice that you had in mind and sing for us but i guess they always sing a hymn. ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ [applause] thank you very much. >> that was wonderful. >> that was really fun. >> that was wonderful. >> that was really fun

>> we don't say this is the greatest black achievers ever but these are just for that we looked at that fit the sensibility of the first black president they did something pioneering something disrupting noisy geniuses or quiet innovators. >> every morning the washington post arrives at my doorstep it seems like a fresh argument for secession it just strips with contempt on the other side. there is a lot of that. what is missing is a tolerance for an understanding of people with very different points of

view in the small town around america if they fall there is no safety net. >> we have vastly over done it with the personal responsibility narrative and then to fall off the tight rope for those catastrophes that follow.