Hi there. I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

What does your education mean to you? What would you be willing to sacrifice for it?

For me and my sister growing up, it was a given that you'd get quote unquote well educated.

You'd get good grades, go to a good college, and most likely graduate, medical, law, or business school.

School was just what you did, ritualized and wrote the way religion is for some other families.

For my guest today, Tara Westover, the framework was completely different.

In her mountain home in Idaho,

school was seen as a threat. It was a government tool for brainwashing people out of faith in

God's teachings and into worldly decadence. She went on to become very well educated by anybody's

standards, studying history at Cambridge University in England and at Harvard, but it came at a very high price.

Her first book, Educated, is a powerful and beautifully written memoir about family, loyalty to

oneself, and the difficult, even impossible choices we sometimes have to make.

Welcome to Think Again, Tara.

Thanks for having me on the show.

You know, this is a very personal book. This was a very personal journey for you that you're writing about and you're going out and you're representing it in the world. I mean, publishing the book, of course, but also talking on shows like this one. What has that been like? What kind of reflections or misunderstandings are you seeing of your

own story that you'd like to correct? How do you want this to go out into the world?

I think broadly, any time I talk to someone who has a different interpretation of the book than I do,

I don't feel a lot of need to correct

them.

Okay.

This is a book about family, and it's about what happens to a family when one person in that

family changes a lot, and that family finds it really hard to keep that person and still accept

...