2022-06-23
58 分钟Part of being able to really live in the present involves really reckoning with the past, the world that you're experiencing, whether it's a new lover or your child or your parents, all of that is going to be heavily, heavily filtered by what was, and it becomes a lot harder to see what is.
And that's kind of one of the ironies I think of when you just refuse to engage with what happened.
What happened becomes the only thing that you see.
Hey.
So by now, you have likely heard the basic story behind Tara Westover's massive blockbuster book.
Educated, raised in Idaho, as she writes, by a dad who viewed the outside world with deep fear and kind of a conspiratorial bent, kept the family isolated, opposed to public education, and forbade Tara and her siblings to attend school.
She spent her days working in the family's junkyard or stewing herbs for her mom, who was a self taught herbalist and midwife.
And she was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom.
And after that, she just immersed herself, pursued learning for a decade, eventually rebelling against the family edict, leaving graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University, winning a Gates Cambridge scholarship, earning a PhD in history from Trinity College in Cambridge, becoming a writer in residence at the Harvard Kennedy School, and eventually a senior research fellow.
And a little bit later in life, when it came time to tell her own story, to write her memoir, to write the book educated, or that would eventually become educated, she wrote the book she needed to write for herself, her truth, but also knew each person in her family.
They had their own story, their own lens on what really happened.
And how do you do justice to your own narrative when the stakes are the ability to potentially ever reconnect with your family for the rest of your life?
Well, in today's conversation, we explore her story, but we also go deeper into Tara's creative journey, her desire to make meaning and to write, to build her own life.
And we talk about what happened leading up to the book's publication as well as that moment, and how it affected her in ways she probably could never really see coming until it finally came.
And we explore how the ensuing years have led her into a new phase of self discovery and revelation, in part because of the stunning global success of the book and also the near overnight exposure of her and her story to millions of people around the world, and how that impacted her as well.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
I want to dive into two elements of your story, of course, for those who are not familiar with it and may not have read the book, and, you know, we take a big step back in time.
Of course, right now you're living in New York.
You have found yourself in a bunch of different places around the world.