I joined the crowd

I received this book for Christmas after having seen a lot of hype around it on various sites. I tend to read mostly fiction and would not likely have bought this book for myself. Reading it, though, I found myself wondering how much of this memoir could be real.

Don’t get me wrong- I absolutely believe that Tara Westover lived through the events of the book. I believe the off-grid existence, and the doomsday prepping, and the abuse. What I had trouble reconciling myself to was the perfect recollection of events and emotions. If the younger four children truly weren’t schooled at home, how did they learn to read? If the grandparents were aware of her father’s mental illness, why wasn’t more done to help the children? When multiple children were maimed by the father’s negligence, why did the whole family just continue on? The motivations of her family members to keep the status quo don’t make sense.

The pacing of the book was strange and I found it jarring to read on one page about how she was failing out of her sophomore year of college and then several pages later she is in an honors program in a different country without much attention given to the process in-between. The bulk of the later part of the memoir is about her conflict with her family and her constant desire to get back to her home and make things right, seemingly putting herself in great personal danger each time, and I found myself wondering how much of this was to build tension for the memoir and how much was due to a true desire to see the family that she left behind.

So much of this book felt like torture porn. I winced aloud several times, and given Westover’s very frank descriptions of her childhood and her seemingly clear-eyed understanding of the abuse she endured I don’t understand why she still has a desire to make amends with these people.