Growing and betraying

“I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.”

Tara Westover spent her childhood in readiness for the imminent apocalypse, with summers spent bottling fruit so that her family might survive the Days of Abomination. Brought up with little contact with those outside the family, even the devout Mormons at her church in rural Idaho are painted as “whores” and “Gentiles”. While her father is in possession of the Truth, everyone else has been duped by Lies and cannot be trusted. By the age of ten Tara was working on her father’s scrap yard, with her and her siblings frequently sustaining horrific injuries while her father insisted that they were protected by angels. Since her father rejected the “medical establishment”, even the gravest of injuries were treated without drugs or