My next guest has an incredible life story, one that is hard to imagine.

Tara Westover was raised as the youngest of seven children in the mountains of Idaho by survivalist parents.

During the first 17 years of her life,

she never set foot in a classroom. But with some encouragement from her brother, she applied to

college, was accepted, and began a journey that would challenge the only belief system

she'd ever known, and it would forever change her. Eventually, Westover earned a PhD

from Cambridge and began writing about her life, not only to help her own healing process, but also

in hopes that her experience might resonate with others facing similar realities. And did it resonate?

Her memoir, educated, spent 135 weeks on the New York

Times bestseller list, and garnered notable praise across the globe. Last year, I had the chance to

sit down with Tara to discuss her book and her life and how she's been impacted by the popularity

of her story. I'm Jenna Bush-Haker and welcome to read with Jenna.

All right, so first, will you just tell me, start off telling me what your childhood was like,

like some of the things that people may find unusual?

Probably people would find a lot of things a little bit unusual.

So I grew up in a family in the mountains of Idaho. I was the youngest of seven children. My dad just didn't believe in a lot of the things that most people

would take for granted. So we weren't allowed to go to school because he was a little bit paranoid

about the government. And he didn't believe in what he called the medical establishment. So we

didn't go to the doctor, no nurses, no vaccinations, nothing like that. Everything was treated at home by my mother, who was a narvelist. And, you know, we were born a home. We didn't have a birth certificate until I was nine. We lived in a pretty unusual, kind of isolated way in rural Idaho. So it was a bit of a different, a bit of a different upbringing.

And now you live in two of the biggest cities in the world. You've gone to two of the most prestigious

colleges or universities in the world. You've published a book that sat on the New York Times bestseller

list for a really, really long time. What is that? Like, could you ever have even imagined

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