Memoir from an Idaho gal who grows up in an negligent-bordering-on-abusive Mormon household until she manages to escape to BYU, then Cambridge. The book is sort of supposed to be about how her education allowed her overcome childhood trauma, but the upbringing (which is traumatic) is never really acknowledged as such, and the author seems heartbreakingly emotionally retarded since she doesn't actually become educated about her relationship to her abusive family – she keeps going back to the well and then being upset that her family remains unchanged.

This book made me get defensive about homeschooling and then she'd digress into a story about almost getting annihilated by heavy machinery under her father's pretense of sticking it to the man/public edu, and then I'm like "oh... that's not schooling at all."

Family tree:

• Father (Gene)
• Mother (Faye)
• Tony - oldest brother, works in the scrapyard, eventually leaves to go work on oil rigs
• Shawn - starts abusing her as soon as she befriends Charles.
• Tyler - first to go to college, gets a PhD in engineering. Has a blog which has some conflicting reports from Tara's accounts. He eventually took it down bc he was basically getting harassed: https://web.archive.org/web/20180521095755/http://www.piecesofthepuzzlecalledtruth.org/. - I have reproduced some snippets at the bottom of my review
• Luke - caught fire in the scrapyard
• Audrey - only sister, also gets estranged taking mother's side. Stays at home to assist in the essential oil business
• Richard - PhD in Chemistry
• Tara

4

Car accident while Tyler is speeding home on the 12hr car ride back from their Grandma's in Arizona:

Mother didn’t come out of the basement for a week. Every day the swelling worsened, the black bruises turned blacker. Every night I was sure her face was as marked and deformed as it was possible for for a face to be, but every morning it was somehow darker, more tumid. After a week, when the sun went down, we turned off the lights and Mother came upstairs. She looked as if she had two objects strapped to her forehead, large as apples, black as olives.

There was never any more talk of a hospital. The moment for such a decision had passed, and to return to it would be to return to all the fury and fear of the accident itself. Dad said doctors couldn’t do anything for her anyhow. She was in God’s hands.

In the coming months, Mother called me by many names. When she called me Audrey I didn’t worry, but it was troubling when we had conversations in which she referred to me as Luke or Tony, and in the family it has always been agreed, even by Mother herself, that she’s never been quite the same since the accident. We kids called her Raccoon Eyes. We thought it was a great joke, once the black rings had been around for a few weeks, long enough for us to get used to them and make them the subject of jokes. We had no idea it was a medical term. Raccoon eyes. A sign of serious brain injury.

5

Father:

He listened to Dad, who settled into a lecture. “There’s two kinds of them college professors,” Dad said. “Those who know they’re lying, and those who think they’re telling the truth.” Dad grinned. “Don’t know which is worse, come to think of it, a bona fide agent of the Illuminati, who at least knows he’s on the devil’s payroll, or a high-minded professor who thinks his wisdom is greater than God’s.” He was still grinning. The situation wasn’t serious; he just needed to talk some sense into his son.

vs. son:

Tyler stayed in school that whole year, from the fall of 1991 through the spring of 1992. He learned algebra, which felt as natural to his mind as air to his lungs. Then the Weavers came under siege that August. I don’t know if Tyler would have gone back to school, but I know that after Dad heard about the Weavers, he never again allowed one of his children to set foot in a public classroom. Still, Tyler’s imagination had been captured. With what money he had he bought an old trigonometry textbook and continued to study on his own. He wanted to learn calculus next but couldn’t afford another book, so he went to the school and asked the math teacher for one. The teacher laughed in his face. “You can’t teach yourself calculus,” he said. “It’s impossible.” Tyler pushed back. “Give me a book, I think I can.” He left with the book tucked under his arm.

Again, a grain of truth to the father's sentiment here. Charitable read of the dad's outlook is that The System indoctrinates a sense of learned helplessness and dependency, and tbh that's kind of how Tara winds up. Not as a result of her education, but the education certainly doesn't equip her to deal with her family – it just physically separates them.

6

Dad lived in fear of time. He felt it stalking him. I could see it in the worried glances he gave the sun as it moved across the sky, in the anxious way he appraised every length of pipe or cut of steel.

describes her actual education:

I read the Book of Mormon twice. I read the New Testament, once quickly, then a second time more slowly, pausing to make notes, to cross-reference, and even to write short essays on doctrines like faith and sacrifice. No one read the essays; I wrote them for myself, the way I imagined Tyler had studied for himself and himself only. I worked through the Old Testament next, then I read Dad’s books, which were mostly compilations of the speeches, letters and journals of the early Mormon prophets. Their language was of the nineteenth century—stiff, winding, but exact—and at first I understood nothing. But over time my eyes and ears adjusted, so that I began to feel at home with those fragments of my people’s history: stories of pioneers, my ancestors, striking out across the American wilderness. While the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of my study.

In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

10

Instance both of violence but also the irony of homeopathic remedy:

“You gonna be a walking Popsicle stick forever?” Shawn says.

“Nope.”

“You need a chiropractor,” he says.

“Mom’ll fix it.”

“You need a chiropractor,” he says again.

The family eats, then disperses. I start the dishes. My hands are in the hot, soapy water when I hear a step behind me and feel thick, callused hands wrap around my skull. Before I can react, he jerks my head with a swift, savage motion. CRACK! It’s so loud, I’m sure my head has come off and he’s holding it. My body folds, I collapse. Everything is black but somehow spinning. When I open my eyes moments later, his hands are under my arms and he’s holding me upright.

“Might be a while before you can stand,” he says. “But when you can, I need to do the other side.”

I was too dizzy, too nauseous, for the effect to be immediate. But throughout the evening I observed small changes. I could look at the ceiling. I could cock my head to tease Richard. Seated on the couch, I could turn to smile at the person next to me.

That person was Shawn, and I was looking at him but I wasn’t seeing him. I don’t know what I saw—what creature I conjured from that violent, compassionate act—but I think it was my father, or perhaps my father as I wished he were, some longed-for defender, some fanciful champion, one who wouldn’t fling me into a storm, and who, if I was hurt, would make me whole.

14

Father is competent, but not a good teacher. Knows trig, sort of, somehow:

When I’d told Dad that I planned to go to college, he’d said a woman’s place was in the home, that I should be learning about herbs—“God’s pharmacy” he’d called it, smiling to himself—so I could take over for Mother. He’d said a lot more, of course, about how I was whoring after man’s knowledge instead of God’s, but still I decided to ask him about trigonometry. Here was a sliver of man’s knowledge I was certain he possessed.

I scribbled the problem on a fresh sheet of paper. Dad didn’t look up as I approached, so gently, slowly, I slid the paper over the blueprints. “Dad, can you solve this?”

He looked at me harshly, then his eyes softened. He rotated the paper, gazed at it for a moment, and began to scrawl, numbers and circles and great, arcing lines that doubled back on themselves. His solution didn’t look like anything in my textbook. It didn’t look like anything I had ever seen. His mustache twitched; he mumbled. Then he stopped scribbling, looked up and gave the correct answer.

I asked how he’d solved it. “I don’t know how to solve it,” he said, handing me the paper. “All I know is, that’s the answer.”

I walked back to the kitchen, comparing the clean, balanced equation to the mayhem of unfinished computations and dizzying sketches. I was struck by the strangeness of that page: Dad could command this science, could decipher its language, decrypt its logic, could bend and twist and squeeze from it the truth. But as it passed through him, it turned to chaos.

14

Shawn suffers a bad fall, but no takes him to the hospital

19

Shawn mocking her in front of Charles:

Shawn took to lingering outside after the crew had finished for the day. I suspect he wanted to be near the driveway when Charles drove up it. He seemed to be forever changing the oil in his truck. The first night he was out there, I ran out and jumped into the jeep before he could say a word. The next night he was quicker on the draw. “Isn’t Tara beautiful?” he shouted to Charles. “Eyes like a fish and she’s nearly as smart as one.” It was an old taunt, blunted by overuse. He must have known I wouldn’t react on the site so he’d saved it, hoping that in front of Charles it might still have sting.

The next night: “You going to dinner? Don’t get between Wilbur and her food. Won’t be nothin’ left of you but a splat on the pavement.”

Shawn had called me Nigger that entire summer: “Nigger, run and fetch those C-clamps!” or “It’s time for lunch, Nigger!” It had never given me a moment’s pause.”

22

When she finally brings Charles over, Shawn bullies her and she gets caught in denial:

The charade couldn’t last, not even until supper. I passed Shawn carrying a large china plate of dinner rolls, and he stabbed my gut so hard it knocked the wind out of me. I dropped the plate. It shattered.

“Why did you do that?” I shouted.

It happened so quickly, I don’t know how he got me to the floor, but again I was on my back and he was on top of me. He demanded that I apologize for breaking the plate. I whispered the apology, quietly, so Charles wouldn’t hear, but this enraged Shawn. He grabbed a fistful of my hair, again near the scalp, for leverage, and yanked me upright, then dragged me toward the bathroom. The movement was so abrupt, Charles had no time to react. The last thing I saw as my head hurled down the hall was Charles leaping to his feet, eyes wide, face pale.

My wrist was folded, my arm twisted behind my back. My head was shoved into the toilet so that my nose hovered above the water. Shawn was yelling something but I didn’t hear what. I was listening for the sound of footsteps in the hall, and when I heard them I became deranged. Charles could not see me like this. He could not know that for all my pretenses—my makeup, my new clothes, my china place settings—this is who I was.

I convulsed, arching my body and ripping my wrist away from Shawn. I’d caught him off guard; I was stronger than he’d expected, or maybe just more reckless, and he lost his hold. I sprang for the door. I’d made it through the frame and had taken a step into the hallway when my head shot backward. Shawn had caught me by the hair, and he yanked me toward him with such force that we both tumbled back and into the bathtub.

The next thing I remember, Charles was lifting me and I was laughing—a shrill, demented howl. I thought if I could just laugh loudly enough, the situation might still be saved, that Charles might yet be convinced it was all a joke. Tears streamed from my eyes—my big toe was broken—but I kept cackling. Shawn stood in the doorway looking awkward.

“Are you okay?” Charles kept saying.

“Of course I am! Shawn is so, so, so—funny.” My voice strangled on the last word as I put weight on my foot and a wave of pain swept through me. Charles tried to carry me but I pushed him off and walked on the break, grinding my teeth to stop myself from crying out, while I slapped playfully at my brother.”

Charles didn’t stay for supper. He fled to his jeep and I didn’t hear from him for several hours, then he called and asked me to meet him at the church. He wouldn’t come to Buck’s Peak. We sat in his jeep in the dark, empty parking lot. He was crying.

“You didn’t see what you thought you saw,” I said.

22

Shawn knocks. I slide my journal under the pillow. His shoulders are rounded when he enters. He speaks quietly. It was a game, he says. He had no idea he’d hurt me until he saw me cradling my arm at the site. He checks the bones in my wrist, examines my ankle. He brings me ice wrapped in a dish towel and says that next time we’re having fun, I should tell him if something is wrong. He leaves. I return to my journal. Was it really fun and games? I write. Could he not tell he was hurting me? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

I begin to reason with myself, to doubt whether I had spoken clearly: what had I whispered and what had I screamed? I decide that if I had asked differently, been more calm, he would have stopped. I write this until I believe it, which doesn’t take long because I want to believe it. It’s comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power.

Okay this bit actually does make sense to me, but it feels like the other radical end of the spectrum of delusion. A better-calibrated take on anti-victimhood:

The victim sees himself or herself as acted on by outside forces. They say things like: "He didn't give me the job.

She's unfair. I'm depressed because the weather is terri-ble. My boss is an idiot. I can't put in good work when management doesn't support me. I'm getting bad grades because the professor hates me." And so on.

There are two problems with this way of thinking.

The first is that it disempowers a person from being able to change anything. The second is that it's incredibly unpleasant and unenjoyable for other people to listen to.

Radical personal responsibility looks at it in a different way. It's a near-delusional worldview in which everything – from the idiot boss, to the hateful professor, and even the depressing weather — is your responsibility.

To take an extreme example - if it's a miserably cold winter and you hate it, you think, "It's on me that it's miserably cold out."

Now, it's absurd to try to assert control over the weather. But once you assert a radical personal responsibility over the situation, you start to think things like – "Ok, it's my responsibility to deal with this. What can I do? Hmm. I can get much warmer and more waterproof clothing. Or I could move closer to the train station so I don't have to walk in the cold as much. Or I could move somewhere else. Or I could learn to not be so bothered by it and appreciate the winter world around me more."

Asserting personal responsibility to a radical extent creates options, but more importantly, it's almost always appreciated. Your boss might well be the biggest idiot on the planet, but if you thrive anyways and become a top producer in spite of it, your name will inevitably be on the lips of anyone talented at the company as someone to watch and a first candidate to recruit away from the company or promote. And you learn the skills of producing and stacking up wins, which is useful for your own development.

Learning how to negotiate and understand unreasonable people, like a potentially unfair professor, goes a long way too. Many people throw their hands up, com-plain, and accept their lot. But taking charge and taking responsibility means doing everything you can to mediate the situation, and you'll learn a lot from it. If the professor was genuinely corrupt - say, marking down anyone who refused to pay the professor money for grades — perhaps you'd be the person to de-throne that corruption and bring it to the attention of the authorities.

Radical personal responsibility creates options. Most people complain to feel better about themselves and accept their lot; you don't.

See also, chinese proverb: "He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived."

Tara's outlook is mental illness, though, and I don't think she ever really comes around to the idea that this outlook does not serve her.

23

I was an incurious student that semester. Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars. I submitted my homework and studied for my exams, but I did so out of terror—of losing my scholarship should my GPA fall a single decimal—not from real interest in my classes.

Not sure if I agree, she received what she herself calls her true education (reading mormon scripture semi-secretly) in the household which was not "secure." Financially, maybe, but physically not.

24

Where Tara does more research about the Ruby Ridge incident and the shooting of randy weaver / his family. She relives the experience through her own eyes, even though it didn't happen to her, and then connects the dots between her father's projection of self on Randy out of dear as a form of delusions of grandeur and self-delusion:

The name Randy Weaver was familiar, and even as I read it I heard it falling from my father’s lips. Then the story as it had lived in my imagination for thirteen years began replaying in my mind: the shooting of a boy, then of his father, then of his mother. The Government had murdered the entire family, parents and children, to cover up what they had done. . .

I read on. The next day, Randy Weaver was shot, also in the back, while trying to visit his son’s body. The corpse was in the shed, and Randy was lifting the latch on the door, when a sniper took aim at his spine and missed. His wife, Vicki, moved toward the door to help her husband and again the sniper opened fire. The bullet struck her in the head, killing her instantly as she held their ten-month-old daughter. For nine days the family huddled in the cabin with their mother’s body, until finally negotiators ended the standoff and Randy Weaver was arrested. . .

There was one thing I still didn’t understand: Why had federal agents surrounded Randy Weaver’s cabin in the first place? Why had Randy been targeted? I remembered Dad saying it could just as easy be us. Dad was always saying that one day the Government would come after folks who resisted its brainwashing, who didn’t put their kids in school. For thirteen years, I’d assumed that this was why the Government had come for Randy: to force his children into school.

But again, there's a trace of "okay so dad was right."

Kind of funny/sad to see how both Tara and her father follow the exact playbook for how they assume the other would behave: Father is afraid that college is gonna turn his daughter into a liberal, and Tara comes home after learning about Ruby Ridge & BPD and immediately snaps at her father having learned new information at school. Maybe that's just the way that generational trauma is ironed out, tail as old as time, etc., But I can expect that she might learn how to navigate talking to her father. She doesn't. Not even by the end of the book.

“I visited Buck’s Peak the weekend after I submitted my paper [on BPD]. I had been home for less than an hour when Dad and I got into an argument. He said I owed him for the car. He really only mentioned it but I became crazed, hysterical. For the first time in my life I shouted at my father—not about the car, but about the Weavers. I was so suffocated by rage, my words didn’t come out as words but as choking, sputtering sobs. Why are you like this? Why did you terrify us like that? Why did you fight so hard against made-up monsters, but do nothing about the monsters in your own house?

Dad gaped at me, astonished. His mouth sagged and his hands hung limply at his sides, twitching, as if he wanted to raise them, to do something. I hadn’t seen him look so helpless since he’d crouched next to our wrecked station wagon, watching Mother’s face bulge and distend, unable even to touch her because electrified cables were sending a deadly pulse through the metal.

Out of shame or anger, I fled. I drove without stopping back to BYU. My father called a few hours later. I didn’t answer. Screaming at him hadn’t helped; maybe ignoring him would.

When the semester ended, I stayed in Utah. It was the first summer that I didn’t return to Buck’s Peak. I did not speak to my father, not even on the phone. This estrangement was not formalized: I just didn’t feel like seeing him, or hearing his voice, so I didn’t.

There is an air of retroactive irony as she uses the same language that she probably felt at the time to describe an experience that clearly happens in the past, after she has gotten some more worldliness and understanding beneath her belt. Qua minute clinic, she says:

“I swallowed the pills. Perhaps it was desperation because I felt so poorly, but I think the reason was more mundane: curiosity. There I was, in the heart of the Medical Establishment, and I wanted to see, at long last, what it was I had always been afraid of. Would my eyes bleed? My tongue fall out? Surely something awful would happen. I needed to know what.”

She describes her first/second boyfriend Nick, who is a bit shocked by her mannerisms and refusal to go see a doctor despite becoming increasingly sick. She's got strep and mono, eventually gets some antibiotics, tells her mom, who sends medicine to flush that junk out of her system:

I leaned back into my pillow and fell asleep almost instantly, but before I did I laughed out loud. She hadn’t sent any remedies for the strep or the mono. Only for the penicillin.

26

I didn’t sleep that night. I kept checking the bolt on the door. The present seemed vulnerable to the past, as if it might be overwhelmed by it, as if I might blink, and when my eyes opened I would be fifteen.

27

Funny to see how one man's trash (Brian Evenson) is another woman's treasure.

BYU still seems like a bastion of regressive thought as her so-called friend Josh says something to the effect that women don't have a capacity for ambition and how he would know that if he still wanted to be a lawyer, even if he felt the way he did feel and was a woman, something must be wrong with him:

A few days before finals, I sat for an hour with my friend Josh in an empty classroom. He was reviewing his applications for law school. I was choosing my courses for the next semester.

“If you were a woman,” I asked, “would you still study law?”

Josh didn’t look up. “If I were a woman,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to study it.”

“But you’ve talked about nothing except law school for as long as I’ve known you,” I said. “It’s your dream, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he admitted. “But it wouldn’t be if I were a woman. Women are made differently. They don’t have this ambition. Their ambition is for children.” He smiled at me as if I knew what he was talking about. And I did. I smiled, and for a few seconds we were in agreement.

Then: “But what if you were a woman, and somehow you felt exactly as you do now?”

Josh’s eyes fixed on the wall for a moment. He was really thinking about it. Then he said, “I’d know something was wrong with me.”

w.r.t. stretching herself at Cambridge, Dr. Kerry says:

“I think you should stretch yourself. See what happens.”

“Stretch myself how?”

He leaned forward suddenly, as if he’d just had an idea. “Have you heard of Cambridge?” I hadn’t. “It’s a university in England,” he said. “One of the best in the world. I organize a study abroad program there for students. It’s highly competitive and extremely demanding. You might not be accepted, but if you are, it may give you some idea of your abilities.”

I walked to my apartment wondering what to make of the conversation. I’d wanted moral advice, someone to reconcile my calling as a wife and mother with the call I heard of something else. But he’d put that aside. He’d seemed to say, “First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”

this is fire. This, however, is not:

For the first time, my parents seemed to be of one mind. Mother no longer moderated Dad’s statements after he left the room, no longer quietly gave her own opinion. She had been transformed by the miracle—transformed into him. I remembered her as a young midwife, so cautious, so meek about the lives over which she had such power. There was little of that meekness in her now. The Lord Himself guided her hands, and no misfortune would occur except by the will of God.

This is such a toxic statement that deprives man of agency and freee will, places all the burden of guilt if it could be so-called of any misfortune that can occur in the wiorld as something that God wills for us. I think that this is a very distorted view of what Christianity aims to be. I'm also reminded this far into the book that the mother is probably still severely brain damaged and has been since like chapter 4.

29

There remains, despite all this ironic reverence and respect for some of the wrong ideas that he father and siblings got which still seemed to have panned out. E.g. she says she never got immunized (but then she does later),

I thought of something Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, had told me over the phone a few days before. She said it had taken her years to convince Tyler to let her immunize their children, because some part of him still believed vaccines are a conspiracy by the Medical Establishment. Remembering that now, with Dad’s voice still ringing in my ears, I sneered at my brother. He’s a scientist! I wrote. How can he not see beyond their paranoia! I reread what I had written, and as I did so my scorn gave way to a sense of irony. Then again, I wrote. Perhaps I could mock Tyler with more credibility if I had not remembered, as I did just now, that to this day I have never been immunized.

Almost as if they were right that one can get pretty far in life w/o needing vaccinations and/or without needing formal education, and still with all these radical ideas. Its very "boy named sue" and it seems to work out. It's setup in a way for her to conclude that she is exceptional in the sense that she made it out of this environment, but that conclusion is not ever forthcoming. She keeps it personal, avoids any such speculation, and doesn't mention anything about other kids who might be trapped in situations like hers. Again, she teeters between resentment at her family, but also is unwilling to ascribe any sort of blame to them for what they're doing.

30

Shallow conceptions of revolutionary feminism as aspiring to be a man. After Shawn kicks his wife Emily out of the house:

Twenty minutes later, when Emily finally stopped shaking, Dad picked up the phone. “Come get your wife!” he shouted into it. Mother was cradling Emily’s head against her shoulder. Dad returned to the sofa and patted Emily’s arm. As I stared at the three of them huddling together, I had the impression that all of this had happened before, and that everyone’s part was well rehearsed. Even mine.

It would be many years before I would understand what had happened that night, and what my role in it had been. How I had opened my mouth when I should have stayed silent, and shut it when I should have spoken out. What was needed was a revolution, a reversal of the ancient, brittle roles we’d been playing out since my childhood. What was needed—what Emily needed—was a woman emancipated from pretense, a woman who could show herself to be a man. Voice an opinion. Take action in scorn of deference. A father.”

33

Tara is a moron:

Shawn turned to me. I had been avoiding him, but suddenly that seemed unfair. He had changed; it was cruel to pretend he hadn’t. He asked if I’d like to go for a drive, and I said I would. Shawn wanted ice cream so we got milkshakes. The conversation was calm, comfortable, like it had been years before on those dusky evenings in the corral. He told me about running the crew without Dad, about Peter’s frail lungs—about the surgeries and the oxygen tubes he still wore at night.”

Not leaving when she hadn't known any life other than this one was forgivable. But now she has experienced normal life and is still blinded by familial... love(?) obligation perhaps. She never articulates why she feels the need to give these scumbags any second chances. I could understand "blood thicker than water" if she ever suggested anything like that, but instead she just keeps touching the hot stove and then being like "aw what the hell!"

34

After experiencing a breakthrough with her mother about the reality of her father & brother while away at Cambridge, she returns home, is threatened by Shawn, and then tries to hold her (BRAIN DAMAGED) moth accountable to a consistency of emotion that she herself does not even possess.

“What the hell am I supposed to think if you ain’t got proof?” Dad was still shouting. Mother sat on the sofa’s edge, her mouth open in a slant. She looked in agony.

“You don’t need proof,” I said quietly. “You’ve seen it. You’ve both seen it.”

Dad said I wouldn’t be happy until Shawn was rotting in prison, that I’d come back from Cambridge just to raise hell. I said I didn’t want Shawn in prison but that some type of intervention was needed. I turned to Mother, waiting for her to add her voice to mine, but she was silent. Her eyes were fixed on the floor as if Dad and I were not there.

There was a moment when I realized she would not speak, that she would sit there and say nothing, that I was alone. I tried to calm Dad but my voice trembled, cracked. Then I was wailing—sobs erupted from somewhere, some part of me I had not felt in years, that I had forgotten existed. I thought I might vomit.

...

“If you’re smart, Siddle Lister,” Shawn said, “you’ll use this on yourself. Because it will be better than what I’ll do to you if you don’t.”

“That’s uncalled for,” Mother said.

I gaped at Mother, then at Shawn. I must have seemed like an idiot to them, but I couldn’t grasp what was happening well enough to respond to it. I half-wondered if I should return to the bathroom and climb through the mirror, then send out the other girl, the one who was sixteen. She could handle this, I thought. She would not be afraid, like I was. She would not be hurt, like I was. She was a thing of stone, with no fleshy tenderness. I did not yet understand that it was this fact of being tender—of having lived some years of a life that allowed tenderness—that would, finally, save me.”

35

“Shawn called an hour later. His tone was casual, and we talked for twenty minutes about Peter, about how his lungs were developing. Then he said, “I have a decision to make, and I’d like your advice.”

“Sure.”

“I can’t decide,” he said. He paused, and I thought perhaps the connection had failed. “Whether I should kill you myself, or hire an assassin.” There was a static-filled silence. “It might be cheaper to hire someone, when you figure in the cost of the flight.”

I pretended I hadn’t understood, but this only made him aggressive. Now he was hurling insults, snarling. I tried to calm him but it was pointless. We were seeing each other at long last. I hung up on him but he called again, and again and again, each time repeating the same lines, that I should watch my back, that his assassin was coming for me. I called my parents.

“He didn’t mean it,” Mother said. “Anyway, he doesn’t have that kind of money.”

“Not the point,” I said.

Dad wanted evidence. “You didn’t record the call?” he said. “How am I supposed to know if he was serious?”

Her father demands proof, and yet she didn't record any of the calls. They were numerous and persistent (even after he spurned her for lack of proof). You would have thought that she would've learned that her father would demand proof after the first incident with the bloody knife and the dead dog Diego. Not to victim blame, but also like what do you expect your dad to do based off of every interaction you've had with him? He has not been remotely helpful pretty much your entire life, and he tells you exactly what he wants (goalposts subject to move, fs), but she's not even playing by her father's rule, nor willing to quite playing the game. Why does she expect him to fix the problem, and if you do, why not conform to his expectations. Seems consistent even with the trauma fwk.

She says that she grows resentful of what her education had earned her, which was estrangement from her family and yet she is like the third person amongst her siblings to receive a PhD. Not saying she more troublesome than the rest of them, but throughout the memoir, she doesnt really sound too fond of her family at all, there's never any sort of "oh but theur they're family and I love them unconitionally" which makes this so troubling. She seems like she has stockholm suyndrome about it all cuz she never really expresses the love Its only ever demonstrated by her returning home where she's always burned, making it hard for me to feel sympathetic towards her. If you love

39

Tara describing making small talk with her semi-estranged brother Luke who she's not spoken to in five years. She says about wanting to ask him if dad told her that she was dangerous, but she said she didn't want to put him in the middle of it, because without an education he needed that job, working for her parents, in order to support his family.

There were Tyler and Stefanie. They had decided to homeschool their seven children, and from what I’d seen, the children were being educated to a very high standard. Luke came in next, with a brood so numerous I lost count. He saw me and crossed the room, and we made small talk for several minutes, neither of us acknowledging that we hadn’t seen each other in half a decade, neither of us alluding to why. Do you believe what Dad says about me? I wanted to ask. Do you believe I’m dangerous? But I didn’t. Luke worked for my parents, and without an education, he needed that job to support his family. Forcing him to take a side would only end in heartache.

How quickly she becomes paternalistic about her education (also still no job? like maybe an academic stipend). She is kind of perpetually an academic herself, but has no job as a result of it, and her siblings seem to have been doing just fine without working for their father. Does he even pay them? Never mentioned. He must be paying Luke, but it's not as if Sean was rolling in cash, he was also entirely beholden to the family business and the father's generosity.

40

In the final chapter, she hops on a soapbox to describe how she decided to cut her father off:

I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.

It was the only way I could love him.

and I conclude that she may not have learned anything despite all the books and the fancy education. This is not love. Sure, the brand of love that her father instilled in her, but what's the point of escaping (and reaching such grand heights at that) if this is still your outlook on life. What ought to seem triumphant rings hollow on the page.

Also am intrigued by the now-taken down rabbit hole of conflicting reports on some of the stories according to her brother

Pieces of the Puzzle Called Truth

5. Knocks on Heads and a Paradigm Shift

The topic of this post is a car accident that that happened when I fell asleep while driving on the way home from a family vacation in Arizona. We had driven through the night (I will comment more on that below) and had stopped at a gas station about 50 miles from home. I had been driving since about 2 AM, and when we stopped my parents both offered to drive. We had just entered Cache Valley where we lived, the sun was just coming up, it felt we were close to home, and I did not think I was very tired. Thirty minutes later, though, I fell asleep, and our car left the road.

The next thing I remember is waking up to find the car bouncing through a field at high speed. I tried to get control of the car and hit the brake but in the surprise of the moment, I probably actually stepped on the gas. The next instant our car drove through and completely severed a wood power pole before running into a very old, small tractor. Tara also recounts this event in great detail in “Educated”, although her memory of the details is quite different than mine. My memory is a bit fuzzy, so I will only describe actions that stood out for me at the time to form strong memories. As soon as the car came to rest, I remember my mom calling out to ask if everyone was okay. The answers seemed to come back that no one in the back was badly hurt. None of us were wearing seatbelts. I had tried to put on my seatbelt but had been unable to extract one of the ends from beneath the seat. As a result of not having a seatbelt, my head had impacted the driver’s wheel with all of the force concentrated on my top two front teeth. The impact knocked the teeth loose, causing them to bleed, and I wondered if I would lose them (they actually healed in a few weeks and are still in good condition today). My mom’s head hit the windshield, giving her a large bruise and likely a concussion. What surprised me is that Richard, who had also been in the front seat without a seatbelt did not report any injury. I asked about that, and my mom replied that as soon as we left the road, she had woken up, and her instinct had been to reach her arm out to try to hold Richard, who was about 11 years old, from hitting the dashboard of the car. Surprisingly, it worked, probably by cushioning Richard’s impact, although her instinct to save Richard likely added to making her own injury worse.

...

Anyway, enough soliquilizing and back to the story. A first police officer arrived quickly and another awhile later. A fairly large bump quickly formed on my mom’s head just above her forehead. She said that the bruising would spread and she would end up with two black eyes. That actually took several hours and by midafternoon the bruising had only spread to one eye, and I thought and hoped that my mom’s predictions would be wrong. However, by that night or the next morning, she did have two black eyes. Tara has reported that my mom had two black eyes at the scene of the accident, but I think that considering the location of the bruise that is not feasible from a medical perspective [emphasis Tyler's]. I do remember there being discussion even with one of the police officers regarding whether an ambulance should be called to take my mom or anyone else to the hospital. It did not appear that anyone was in immediate crisis, so it was decided that we would go home first and see how things went from there.  At home, I remember that my mom’s headache got worse as the swelling and pressure on her brain increased. To deal with that, my parent’s called a friend to perform energy therapy, and my mom said that actually helped her a lot. Although I believe that my mom’s head injury was serious, I do not remember it being nearly as bad as Tara indicates. Before the accident, my mom often called us kids by the wrong name (I never understood that as a kid, but now that I am a parent with several children, I do it too). After the accident, I did not notice that she called any of us by the wrong name any more often than she had before or had any other long-term memory or cognitive problems. I think she did have headaches more often for a while.

...

It is worth noting that in Tara’s first draft description of this accident, she wrote that no one called the police and the police were not involved at all because my dad did not want them there. In order to convince Tara that police were actually present at the accident, I had relay to her that they had given me a ticket for crossing the centerline of the road and that they had taken many pictures of the accident, some of which showed the police cars and which they gave to me. I had pretty solid evidence, so Tara eventually conceded that I must be right about the police being there. What is strange to me is that Tara felt sufficiently confident to describe minute details of the accident, including words people said and things they did, and yet did not even remember the police investigation at the scene or their flashing lights. She also did not pick up on Richard’s apparent miraculous escape from injury or correctly remember my mom’s head injury, all of which to me are among the most salient features of the event. I tend to conclude that Tara’s description of the accident came in large part from her imagination, which she then later remembered as memories, similar to an incident that she writes about at the beginning of “Educated.” That is the only way that I can reconcile her memories with mine and with the facts that can be verified.

....

There is a question remaining, which is why our family drove through the night to return home from the vacation. Tara seems to assign the cause to be mental illness on my dad’s part. I think other factors provide better understanding.

7. How Not to Handle Reports of Abuse

This post is worth reading in its entirety yourself. Insofar as it pertain to conflicting reports, after qualifying greatly and appropriately how to proper handle such situations, Tyler writes:

I believe that the single clash with my dad and Shawn has been a source of confusion for Tara. In "Educated" Tara writes that I was extremely anxious about the decision to support her and for many nights went to bed saying things like "What am I to do? She is my sister." That is not accurate and actually contradicts the message that I always told Tara, which was that there was no problem in that regard. When I had the disagreement with my dad and Shawn, I did not mention Tara but kept my concerns to the other matters mentioned above. Because Tara was so worried about it, though and because I did not want to find myself as the arbitrator in a triangle of relationships, I always fully supported Tara when I interacted with all other members of my family, even Shawn. In every case, everyone in the family has always encouraged me to support Tara and never indicated to me that they wished I would not. I consistently argued Tara's case and let others assume that I agreed with Tara in all important points.

...

There is one more event connected to these issues that should probably be mentioned, which is the death of Shawn’s dog, Diego. Of course, killing a dog with a knife is gruesome and not usually necessary. The event was briefly mentioned above, and it seems that I should not completely gloss over it. In doing so, I must first clarify that I was not there, so for the most part I have to rely on Tara’s description. Tara reports the incident as “Shawn stepped outside and slashed the dog to death, while his young son, only feet away, listened to the dog scream.” 

Her description of this act as a heinous crime of extreme animal cruelty is clearly intended to disgust and horrify the reader. However, there is a significant problem with this version of the execution, as Tara calls it. Tara was not actually present at the event and only learned about it sometime later from our mother, who wasn’t there either. It seems inescapable that the details about Shawn slashing the dog to death while Peter listened to the dog scream were provided from Tara’s imagination. The only reasons that Tara offers to justify this account is the fact that the knife was small, barely bigger than a man’s thumb, and there was blood near Shawn’s door. She concludes that it was not the knife of a farmer, or even of a butcher, but that it was a knife of rage. In reality, nearly all farmer’s knives that I have seen are quite small, making them easy to carry at all times and suitable for a wide range of functions, such as cutting twine string or weeds from a tiller. Saying that the instrument was a “knife of rage” is a nice concluding touch, but saying that it was not a farmer’s knife because it was small makes no sense at all. 

It is worth noting that Shawn has a way with animals much like Lucas, and I do not remember ever witnessing Shawn unnecessarily causing an animal pain. It does not seem likely that he would “slash an animal to death” when he could easily inflict a mortal wound that would cause a relatively painless and fast death (such as cutting an artery in the neck). In making these comments, I do not intend to defend Shawn's actions, whatever they were, but I must admit that I generally dislike sensational narratives of events by people who were not present to witness the event in question and do not have a description from anyone else who may have been present. I much prefer to have the truth simply told without embellishments, especially embellishments that come from uninformed or greatly biased sources. (I believe my own bias in such matters was clear a few posts ago.)

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