Books to Borrow Williamsburg Public Library Recommends

We remember what we remember of our childhoods. Other family members remember what they remember.

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom, heard about the Holocaust or the Civil Rights movement.

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she helped her family stockpile home-canned food, stewing herbs in the summer with her mother, a midwife and healer, and salvaging metal in her father's junkyard in the winter.

Her father distrusted the medical community, so Tara never saw a doctor. Injuries and illnesses, both minor and severe, were treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children got an education, and no one to intervene when an older brother became violent.

When another brother left, got into college and came back with news of another world beyond the mountain, Tara became determined to find her way to a new life. Teaching herself enough math, grammar and science to pass the ACT test, she was admitted to Brigham Young University.

Even though she struggled, out of her element and fearful of doctors until she became so sick, her friends took her to a clinic, where for the first time in her life she swallowed an Advil and an antibiotic, Tara was transformed by her quest for knowledge. Over the next 10 years she traveled to Harvard and Cambridge University, where she eventually received a doctorate.

But, the pull of home and family was always strong, taking her back to the mountains, the culture and the abuse. Finally, unable to maintain contact with family, because of fear of real harm from her brother and because her family covered that abuse up, she finds herself in the depression of grief and loss of those ties. Slowly she surfaces and works her way to an understanding of who she was, and who she now is.

Tara Westover is now known as an historian and author.