Edmond Town Hall’s “Newtown Talks: Conversations on Culture, Society, and Change” speaker series will continue next month with author Tara Westover, who will discuss her journey from growing up in a strict household that opposed public education to pursuing college education despite the wishes of her parents.

The event is planned for Thursday, March 27, at 7 pm, Edmond Town Hall, 45 Main Street. Much like the other programs in the “Newtown Talks” series, this conversation will be moderated by Suzy DeYoung and Lee Shull.

General admission is $40, while preferred seating and “skip the line” book signing is $55. Tickets can be purchased in person at Edmond Town Hall or online at edmondtownhall.org.

Westover did not have a conventional childhood. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she and her siblings salvaged scrap from her father’s junkyard nearby. They stocked countless jars of canned peaches to prepare for “the end times.” Their father repeatedly told them stories of the Feds finding their house and attacking them, angry because the parents wouldn’t send their children to public school as they believed the government would brainwash them. Instead, she and some of her siblings were occasionally homeschooled by their mother.

Westover slowly became more independent from her family by taking on jobs and pursuing musical theater at the town nearby. A part of her was interested in pursuing a formal education herself, but the idea was shot down by her father. It wasn’t until Westover was 17 that she set foot in a classroom for the first time and, shortly afterward, began her journey toward formal education.

Westover eventually worked her way into Brigham Young University, and later completed a PhD program in history at Cambridge University. She documented this journey in her 2018 memoir Educated, which also explores the transformative power of education and the family loyalty she sacrificed to achieve it. The book debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and spent 132 consecutive weeks on its Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers list.

In an interview with The Newtown Bee, Westover said the response to the book was nothing short of surprising. Writing a book like Educated, Westover felt that her story and experiences were too specific and extreme; that most people probably wouldn’t see themselves in it and might even find it uninteresting.

“I was wrong about that, and people are actually able to see themselves in a lot of different people and situations,” Westover said. “It’s been pretty meaningful.”

She said this also speaks to the universal nature of storytelling. Even if people might not directly relate to Westover’s experiences one-to-one, she said she believes a lot of people come from places where they struggle through difficult family situations or go through a process of change and become comfortable with a new sense of self.

Westover said seeing all these people from wildly different lives come up to her at events and express how they connected with the book means a lot to her.

“I really think that those are special moments where you realize, ‘Oh, we can be totally different and have something that is the same,’” Westover said.

A Metamorphosis

After releasing Educated in 2018, Westover said her life changed “quite a bit” at first. Prior to that, Westover said, she was trying to be an academic. Being an academic, she added, is rather hard and there are not that many jobs in the field. Not only that, but also Westover said that she was really stressed about money all the time, and was walking dogs while writing Educated.

“I was doing anything I could to scrape together rent money,” she explained.

The release of Educated, she said, changed her daily routine a lot at first. Westover went on tour and said she was trying to adjust to this new identity she “supposedly had as an author.”

Nowadays, her life has comparatively settled down. Westover said she finds her days are not so different from what they were when she was a PhD student, and involves cycling between coffee, books, work, and more.

Westover said writing the memoir in some ways helped her reconnect with her younger self. However, she added that she didn’t know why it was valuable to have a connection to her younger self, at least at first.

Westover believes she had this idea as a historian, and in part due to her upbringing, that she overvalued competence and strength and did not understand why it was important for someone to be on good terms with “all of their selves.”

For people who had difficult upbringings, she said, their personality can become a little lopsided — and she was no different. Writing the book did have the effect of helping her connect with her younger self, but Westover also said she did not think she had the wisdom to know why it was useful.

“I think Joan Didion has a nice line about being on nodding terms with all the people that you used to be. I don’t think I was on nodding terms, but I think the book did help me start that project that I then had to continue,” Westover said.

Pursuing education in the first place was an incredibly difficult choice for her. For those who did not grow up in a family where education is prized or get exposed to different opportunities, Westover said it can be very difficult to imagine why education is important or valuable.

She noted it’s equally important to understand what makes education wonderful as much as it is to be aware of its limitations. People with privilege who are exposed to education at a young age can see it clearly, pass on what they’ve learned, and have opportunities that lead them in so many directions that someone without that exposure would have never even thought about.

Westover said she was lucky one of her older brothers, Tyler, went to college and encouraged her to go when he came back home.

“By that point, I had never been in a classroom before, so I don’t think without him telling me, ‘This is important. You should try this …’ I don’t know that I would have even thought about it,” Westover said.

Westover said she just crossed over the boundary where she first left the mountain for college when she was 17 and still went back regularly until she was around 20. Now 28, Westover is at the point where she has spent about as much time off the mountain as she did on it.

The separation from where she spent so much of her life is a strange feeling, Westover said. She added that crossing over any threshold like that makes someone realize their background is a huge part of who they were and how they come into the world. In the real way someone’s family makes them, Westover said there is a real sense of change in the way someone shapes their own life.

“I’ve lived just as long away now as I lived there, and in some ways just chose very, very different things. So you can weigh all of this when you think about who you are, but you kind of have to allow yourself to be more than one self,” Westover said.

Education And Family

In the age of social media where a wealth of information is available at someone’s fingertips, Westover said the avenues for people educating themselves has changed. There is a lot of information that is easily available and accessible online, which Westover said is a good thing.

She also said she worries society puts less emphasis on in-person teaching and on the experience of having a teacher, however. More specifically, Westover said she worries class and privilege will become more pronounced; that people with resources and labels will still get traditional education in a classroom while people without that will be given a bunch of YouTube videos to watch.

She noted education will always be different depending on someone’s background, but technology will escalate those issues.

“I’m a strong believer in autodidacticism and the ability to teach yourself things. I think it’s wonderful, but I get anxious about the idea that people from different socioeconomic backgrounds will experience education so differently,” Westover said.

For anyone who has been or is in a similar situation to her, where they struggle to separate themselves from their family and the expectations they pose onto them, Westover said she believes everyone has to have a different solution for themselves.

She continued, saying nobody can tell them how to manage their obligations to both themselves and to other people.

“I think there’s a degree of trusting yourself that you’ll know when the big decisions have to be made and what to do,” Westover said.

A lot of times when it comes to complicated family relationships, Westover said it’s a process and not necessarily one thing or the other.

“It’s just a cultivation of commitment to your own well-being,” she added.

Westover said this was less of a factor for her when she was younger. She was instead more focused on loyalty to her family, being a good daughter, and meeting other people’s expectations. As she got older, Westover said she realized that if she didn’t look out for herself, nobody will.

“Once you’ve taken care of yourself, you can love a lot of other things, too. But sometimes, you’re in a place where nobody is actually taking care of you, and you have to do that before you can kind of reopen yourself to the world,” Westover said.

As for how the “Newtown Talks” event came to be, Edmond Town Hall Business Manager Lauren DiMartino said she felt that the discussion on the importance of education and perseverance was one Newtown residents could relate to, and that people would benefit by having a conversation around that subject matter.

Beyond education, Westover said she and the moderators will talk about aspirations, family dysfunction, loyalty to oneself and the people they love, and much more.

Westover said she suspects some people will come for one thing, and other people will come for another thing. In the same way that she doesn’t have a particular set of ideas she wants people to get from her book, Westover said she feels the same about the event.

“Everybody’s in a different place, and that’s part of the excitement,” Westover said.

A Q&A and book signing will follow the speaking engagement. Copies of Education will be provided by Byrd’s Books for prepurchase and night of the event. For more information about this event or the “Newtown Talks” series, visit edmondtownhall.org. For more information about Tara Westover, visit tarawestover.com.

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Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.