I spent years avoiding this book.

It was a bestseller that got mentioned everywhere. Everyone had an opinion about it in 2018 and the years that followed. It was on every recommendation list (Oprah, Bill Gates, throw a stone and you’d hit at least two people who had heard of it), and somehow that put me off.

What gets praised too often turns out to be mediocre.

I finally read it, well… I listened to it, actually. And it was pretty meh. I’ve read better and I’ve read worse.

The book is not a masterpiece from a literary point of view. There is nothing special about it for me. I think that if I had been forced to wade through all those words every single time just to find out that she got out of the car and walked toward the house, I would have lost my mind. The audiobook is more bearable. It’s a way of writing that is too precious for my taste, too flowery.

It’s funny, though, when you think about the life she describes in the book and how she finally got an education, and what an education it was, that she now somehow feels the need to put every word she knows on paper.

I’m being a bit mean, but if it weren’t for her story (her version of the story), which probably shocked people, the book would have been ordinary. But I suppose it is one of the stories that deserve to be told/written, and that’s all that matters in the end.

In short, the book is about her, Tara Westover, who lives in Idaho, in a family of (very) devout Mormons who actively prepare for the end of the world: stockpiling supplies, avoiding all contact with the state, obsessing over conspiracy theories. There are seven siblings who are never sent to school, some of whom don’t even have a birth certificate.

She never says it outright, but to me this family looks more like a cult.

The father is a man who believes in conspiracies (the CIA listening in on him, the Illuminati, vaccines, you name it), he is deeply religious, has zero empathy, and has a constant tendency to put his family in danger through one idiotic decision after another.

He doesn’t come across as brainwashed, just so convinced of his own ideas, so sure that everyone else just doesn’t get it and is being manipulated, while he alone holds the supreme truth.

They get into car accidents twice because of their father, who insisted on setting off for home at dusk. Obviously they don’t believe in seatbelts either. In the first accident their mother nearly dies, and even that isn’t enough to teach him anything, because the second accident happens in exactly the same way.

Tara is put in countless situations where she nearly breaks something or slices open a limb, but “the angels are watching over us,” says her father, and that’s that.

Two of her other brothers are left with lifelong damage: one falls from a height and hits his head, the other catches fire. The fire scene is described in great detail and it’s not a pleasant one.

Oh, and to top it all off (if it wasn’t already somewhat predictable), the parents don’t take them to the hospital; they treat them at home. A man with burns all over his skin is treated at home, the dead skin cut away, no doctor, no antibiotics. What the actual fuck?!

And you know what else? Her mother ends up making and selling essential oils that can cure anything, including cancer, building a small empire (according to Tara).

Want to know something else? Her mother no longer needs to know whether the recipe for the oil is complete, whether someone needs a doctor’s X-ray for a problem, whether someone suffers from depression, because she can feel all of that through energies and adjust them. She touches her fingers, click click, and there you go, divine information becomes available to her and she knows everything she needs.

Tara manages to leave home, gets to college, graduates from Cambridge and gets a doctorate from Harvard.

And it’s fascinating to watch this girl get away from that house where everyone is insane, a toxic and violent environment, and experience for the first time things that would seem normal to almost anyone else.

She had so many gaps in her general knowledge, things anyone could place in time and space, even events they never lived through, so much so that she was shocked as she started discovering them.

For her, a whole world literally opened up, a universe she had no idea existed.

She didn’t know what the Holocaust was.

I think what turned me off the most about this book, and maybe it has to do with the way I am, was the fact that she went back home so many times after leaving, trying to get some kind of validation, some kind of acceptance from her father. Trying to prove she was still part of the family, even after taking this path where she went out into the world and learned from man’s knowledge (only God’s teachings are the good ones, after all). At times it genuinely disgusted me.

After you’ve been out there and seen the world and had your eyes opened, to try to convince yourself that maybe you’re wrong after all and they’re right, to literally lie to yourself in order to receive acceptance, you smother all your senses and your own logic just to stay part of that family. That’s why I said this relationship looked more like the one you’d find in a cult.

Once again, the story itself, her journey as a character, where she started from and where she ended up, is something worth telling. There’s no doubt about it.