And here’s a third memoir I read recently, inspired by that NYT list — though in this case, the book didn’t place on the final list, though it was nominated by a couple of the 500 contributors who revealed their personal votes. And I had a copy — again, as with Coates, bought sometime after first publication. I have the 19th printing.
What attracted me to this was its story about growing up in rural Idaho, in a survivalist family, and then breaking out and discovering the real world. Just up my alley, right? Knowledge wins out? As it turned out, that’s only part of the story, and not even the main point.
My description of the situation is accurate enough. The author, Tara, grew up as one of seven kids up in rural Idaho. They don’t go to school. Four of the kids don’t even have birth certificates. They’ve never been to a doctor or a nurse. They live preparing for the Days of Abomination. Only their mountain peak, Buck’s Peak, is eternal; the outside world is suspect.
Father reads from the Bible, and the Book of Mormon. The family is nominally Mormon, but Dad thinks Illuminati spies have infiltrated the church. He thinks schools are a government ploy to lead children away from God. Mother makes tinctures from herbs, and as the book proceeds, becomes a midwife. And Dad is obsessed with a story about a neighbor family that was besieged by the Feds, as justification for his deep mistrust of the entire government. Father makes a living running a junkyard, breaking down scrap metal, and is very casual about it. There are several incidents throughout the book in which Tara, or one of her brothers, is injured, in the junkyard; in one case Father himself is nearly burned alive; and in parallel, not once but twice does the family travel by car to Arizona, try to return via a long overnight drive, and in the middle of the night wreck the car, some of them barely surviving.
Tara herself seems preternaturally gifted. She’s determined to attend school, and does well once a friend points out to her that she needs to *read the textbooks*! She goes university, and learns about all the things her parents never told her about — the Depression, World War II, civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. She takes a psych course and realizes her father might be affected by bipolar disorder. A professor at BYU suggests Cambridge. She spends a session there, then gets a scholarship.
The broad arc: Tara is torn apart by her family, but even as she gets a secular education and expands her worldview, she can’t resist returning to the mountain again and again. By the end her parents, ironically, have become successful through Mother’s products — a spiritual alternative to Obamacare. They hugely expand their house. Tara earns a Ph.D. On her last visit home, the only reconciliation is “the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs…” (322.6)
As the author finishes this book, she has not seen her parents in years. Of her family, four siblings stayed at the mountain, without high school diplomas; three others left, and got doctorates.
So as the book ends, it’s not about Tara’s secular education. It’s more about … not accepting, not accommodating… but perhaps understanding, her family. Understanding her transformation. Here are the final lines, in which she reflects how different a person she is than she was at age 16. She can’t see that person in her mirror.
Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed–how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance–I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house.
That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.
You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.
I call it an education.
Other items…
- Her Dad is obsessed about Y2K, and when nothing happens, never mentions it again. He feels denied by God.
- One of her brothers, Shawn, is mean and abusive, and when Tara finally has the courage to speak up, her parents don’t believe her.
- Her Dad’s fear about the Feds coming down on a local family was based on fact: the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident. Though of course her Dad spins the facts a bit.
- Tara realizes that in her world “The whole world was wrong; only Dad was right.” 249.0
To me, one obvious lesson to the story is, as observed before: children don’t belong to their parents, and parents are fooling themselves if they think they can raise duplicates of themselves. Parents have very little influence on how their children grow up; see Steven Pinker about this. Children belong to the race; the genes mix up in every generation…
In passing, some good insight into the nature of history, as Tara struggles to decide what to specialize in at Cambridge, page 238:
Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught. Dad could be wrong, and the great historians Carlyle and Macaulay and Trevelyan could be wrong, but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it.
Whereas, page 239:
From my father I had learned that books were to be either adored or exiled.
Finally, I have to note that I recognize many of the tendencies of this religious family in my own family, in my parents and even siblings. A certainty about how things are, and must be. An extremely simplistic way of thinking about the world. I escaped that, I think, by neither having grown up in, nor settled in as an adult, a small town. And I read books, and my parents and siblings didn’t.
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Most mornings I reread, polish, and copy-edit my post from the evening before. If this comment is still here, I have not yet done so for this post.
