>> you can watch this and other programs online booktv.org. >> i'm next, tara westover details her wife growing up with survivalists parents in the idaho mountains. her introduction to formal education at age 17 and her graduation from cambridge university. she's interviewed by susan kaelin. afterwards is a weekly interview program with hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors with their latest work. >> host: i'm so happy and thrilled to be here with you today for your book "educated". this is one of the most extraordinary memoirs i've read. i'm honored to be here today.

i was blown away by this. reading it for a second time made my experience more profound. i want to die right in and ask you to read a bit. i'll let you take that. >> turning toward toward the house on the hillside i see movements of a different kind, tall shadows for the current. my brothers are awake testing the weather. my mother at the stove hovering over brown pancakes. my father by the back door lacing his boots and threading his callous stance into welding gloves.

on the highway below the school bus went past without stopping. i'm only seven but i understand the suspect more than any other that makes my family different. we don't go to school. dad worries the government forces to go but it can't. for my seven siblings don't have birth certificates. we don't have medical records or school records. when i'm nine i'll be delighted certificate of birth. but at this moment i do not exist. of course i did exist. i waited for the sun to darken a spent my summers bottling peaches when the world the men failed my family would move on affected. >> i want to start in idaho where this takes place. can you tell me and you about what it was like as a 10-year-old version of yourself.

>> we had affirmed applying to my grandfather. it was beautiful. there is we fields and mountains. it was a big mountain but just beautifully made. it came up out of the earth and formed into a perfect spire. i'd always been told the story that every spinning there would be an image of a woman's body my dad called it -- and he had a story that the nomadic indians would look for her spine and it's a sign that spring ended in winter was over and it's a time for them to come back. the farm was a junkyard and so we played on it like a playground. there's a lot of beauty in my childhood. it took me a long time to realize it wasn't completely

normal. there were elements of it that were unusual. my dad was opposed to the institutions that most people take for granted. public education, doctors and hospitals. that meant i was not allowed to go to school or the dr.. i did have a birth certificate until i was nine years old. >> it's an interplay between this idyllic existence like you're running round free and almost a magical place. that there is the other side there's very much two sides to your childhood experience. >> the mountain was beautiful. anything with one side had another. my mother was an herbalist a midwife. we would spend hours on the mountain gathering herbs.

but the junkyard was a playground but we also got hurt quite a bit. many injuries like the time my brother with his leg on fire and it was covered in birds we treated it at home because my father didn't believe in doctors or hospitals. the situation like that the herbals which was a wonderful thing it could be a bit scary when you're dealing with the real injury that you don't have morphine or things like that. >> can we speak about your father's philosophy? they did share in the philosophy but seems to me it came mostly from your father. >> i think was mostly coming from him. sometimes i think was a spiritual dr. and sometimes he had the there that all these

institutions have been infiltrated by some kind of well-meaning organization. think is a reason for opposing these things he believed they were trying to do us harm. he believed it. >> can you pinpoint what he was afraid of really? from these different sources, where was the fear base? >> guest: it depends on which institution you're talking about. he was concerned about the medical establishment that they were not doing good. but he believes things people take, drugs would damage your body and the effects would last

for years. they would damage you spiritually and you should use herbs. what she called god's pharmacy. he was worried public education would brainwash and lead us away from god. he's a complicated person. >> brainwashing seems to be a big part of what he was talking about here of you being brainwashed for the illuminati coming in, part of it is the fear of someone changing the path that he has set for his children, is that the fear, some of this outsider perspective? >> guest: think he was worried that we might go to a dr. or compromise our health and

spirituality. the path was there when you needed to do these exact things to stay in good standing with god and be a good person. i think that was a fear that you could get sucked into this world many people have that idea but for my father it included doctors you are mormon, but this is not a mormon perspective. >> guest: most mormons, almost all know they support education, most send their kids to school or believe in homeschool and they definitely believe in doctors and thinks. >> i found it interesting that you wanted to make that point.

>> guest: right now the environment so polarized and people will latch onto any story to confirm their own preconception. think my dad had some regular ideas and the way his mind worked i felt like maybe he had some mental irregularity. in my mind the religious extremism was a vehicle for that. whatever was happening in his mind cause this. i don't want people to take the story and say all religious people like this are these people are different from us. >> from reading the book this is

a for lance me. in many ways. that is not the take away at all. what's interesting is the idea of people taking from what's going on in the news and applying it with a worldview. there's an example that you called your first memory which is not a memory. can talk about that role in shaping that fear -based police. >> he did have these ideas about the government especially around the time of the ruby ridge incident. we weren't so different from them in the way that we lived in be in isolated. when that happened to them my dad was quite worried it could happen to anyone.

it's not completely irrational. i was about five when that happened we went into this time where we are canning a lot. we were preparing and had bags that if we needed to run and hide in the mountain we would have them. i would journal entry from a few years later when i had the spake and i documented pages of the heater for the emergency food and water. fires and mosquito nets. everything you need to live on the mountains. for me am not sure how long it went on for my dad but it live down in my mind is a frightening thing. it made me feel like the government could come at any moment. he never told us the end of the story. the weavers were family who lived in idaho.

the way it began was that had to do with a conflict over a rifle that randy weaver had sold to an undercover atf agent. he missed the court date and then the federal marshals did some surveys and somehow there's a conflict where a dog was shot in an agent and then randy weaver. it got out of hand quickly. randy weaver was shot agents run to the cabin and ultimately his wife, vicki was shot while holding their baby. it surrenders. that was the version i was told. i remember having dreams where we crawl around on the floor their snipers outside.

because he didn't come to the end of the story is 17 i was at university and heard the end of the story. like there have been a massive public outcry and congressional inquiries in every major newspaper covered the story. when i was a child there was about how mean the government was in there going to come for us. but then i realized it was a terrible thing that happened but there were checks on it. that's how democracy works. it wasn't kept a secret or covered up as a very much public outcry. >> part of the fear of is a 5-year-old it's terrifying. you very much identified with

that family do you feel like you were not alone and that knowledge would've been comforting to? >> if i had an understanding of how the institutions themselves responded, the government wasn't this holy, evil force and a callous disregard for human life i think that might be with the congressional report said. that's a different idea of government that there is a free press. i didn't just learn this they learned about the roads slippery press. that changes the story. >> host: i want to go back to different stages of her education in this book.

let's talk about the education you learned with your family. it's not a traditional education but tell me some of the values and things he learned as a child that most people haven't learn learned. >> guest: my older brothers were younger think my mother did a good job of homeschooling. by the time i came along she had seven kids, a midwife, there was not a lot of homeschooling going on. i never wrote an essay or took an exam nothing like a lecture. the homeschool i received was limited but there's something of value from my parents, just the way they raced us. they have a philosophy that you can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.

it's a principle i really agree with. i worried a lot we talked but education in this country, it's passive and i think there should be an individual component to it, if it's just social it is a bit propaganda. people need to feel actively engaged in designing their curriculum. at some level, hate the word to some power. but i think people have taken to heart that learned something you have to have a degree in an institution in place to teach it to you. i'm grateful that i was raised not to think that. when i wanted to go to college at 16 it felt like something i could do. so if i need to learn algebra i'll buy a book and learned.

i didn't do amazing but i kept going. my parents took it too far and i arrived at university underprepared. people thought i was denying the fact that i had never heard about the holocaust before. but i think they had something there about people feeling ownership of what they learn. when you think of education people talk about it as a way to make money and get a job. i think it's about making a person. everyone should have the opportunity to participate in the making of their mind. people need to be more involved in their own education. >> host: how did the way you were raised help you write the

book? it's not easy. >> guest: i did not know how to write narrative. i had not written a word of narrative. i had a phd because once i got to school i really committed. ten years later i graduated with a phd. i knew academic writing by the but i did know how to write prose. it's the same principle, i sat down and thought this is a skill i want so how can i get it the thing for me that made a difference was the new york fiction podcast which is amazing. they have great writers commodity read stories of other great writers. more to the point, it was a curriculum that work for me so i can pursue it and didn't have to

spend a lot of time using a curriculum that didn't work for me. >> were there any books particularly helpful. >> when i started writing it i never read a short story. but i found them so helpful. i read a lot of books a lot of toni morrison because she's a genius and a ton of short stories. there's so many great writers. you take the ones that speak to and there's some amazing writers that i enjoy but they're nothing like i write and then there are some writers that too. that's the beauty of having

control over how you learn. what were you reading in your childhood? >> i wrote a lot of religious books. i read the book of mormon in the bible and a lot of 19th century speeches by the founding mormon prophets. >> it's interesting when he went to school for the first time you rode in the stilted style. >> yes, that was i think a lot of my successors were very bewildered i took a while to get that voice out. >> is an amazing the right invoices so different than the talking voice. you had to really work on it needn't speak in that way. isn't it interesting that was

the part. >> a lot of people feel a certain self-consciousness about writing. and when you feel that you become more formal. i've noticed it that people will use words like establishments instead of building or was that you would never use because i think they feel like they sound more intellectual or something. i had that but a bad case of it. >> host: how long did it take you to get that out? >> guest: i wrote the hoboken the year the first four months everything i wrote was terrible. >> host: are you being hard on yourself? >> guest: it was really bad. i took it to a writing group on

send was lucky because i didn't think of myself as a writer. i was trying to learn to write. it wasn't part of my identity when they said this was terrible set i know. of course it is. i'm not a writer. tell me how to make it better. that was a wonderful place kazan no personal feelings about it as all i literally never wrote a story before so is a great place. >> you journaled for a good portion, talk about the journals that you have. >> couple journal entries when i say but i got serious about it at ten. i have a whole stack. >> summer difference a lot given to me by my grandmother and they

tend to have a picture of jesus on them. almost all of them up to the age of 16. other than their black. >> for me it's about i don't think i understand something until i write it down, why were you doing it? >> i think there is a bit of loneliness. sometimes i detect they didn't have any friends. there is another family who lived in my town but they didn't believe in doctors, all the kids my town i never went to their houses or was never invited. i have my siblings but i would write in this journal so i could tell someone my stuff.

i think there is a processing element to it. other than that i don't know why did it but i launch onto it. >> do you still journal now? >> was interesting to me going back to childhood was for me a big part of something i did not recognize on my own this physical pain, and childhood risk get her knee and you are in a junkyard, there is a part where you have an accident in the junkyard, can you talk about that? >> guest: my dad ran a junkyard and for whatever reason he did not have the bone in his head that would tell him this is a dangerous thing.

even after someone was heard he didn't always understand how serious it was. i think he thought everything that happened happen for the best and we would be protected. he didn't believe in safety equipment. we would build big buildings and didn't wear safety harnesses or safety hats. i don't think it's because he didn't care about her safety, think he did but i don't think he understood how dangerous it was. there is one example when i was 14 i was filling up a bin of scrap metal. when it was full it had to be picked up by a forklift with an extendable boom than it had to be dumped into a massive semi trailer. i filled it up and said that

stump it. he wanted someone to go into the trailer and settled the scrap after he dumped it. so he thought it would be faster if i wrote up in the bid and then set a hold that level and then you can crawl over to the cab where you'll be out of the way the falling metal and everything will be great. i was terrified. but i got in the bin and as he was turning to go around for the trailer was a bit of scrap came loose and it had a jagged edge and pierced through my leg. i couldn't move. he had the bin that was level and waiting for me to crawl out. i was trying to shut out that i couldn't move but he couldn't hear me. so then he starts raising it up.

i know he's gonna dump the been and i'll be like going through a meat grinder. luckily when it started to fall i was able to throw myself up over the side. i was injured but okay. i think i first experienced anger that dissipated quickly and then i felt ashamed. seem like a simple thing and i didn't know why i couldn't do it. what i was missing as i knew my dad would never hurt me on purpose. they did not have the information that there might be something going on in his head or he could value my safety but not be able to keep me safe.

there might be in a nation. i knew he would never hurt me but yet i got hurt. i think we experience events in it so easy to internalize gilts. i had to be older before i could look back and not be ashamed. then there is a time i was just angry and now i feel like i have all of the pieces and can put it together and say he would never want me to be hurt but for whatever reason he was not able to understand the risk of what he was doing. >> i'm blown away by the fact that you're not angry. so many are angry at their parents. this is a pretty major thing. you seem to not hold anger towards him.

>> guest: i think anger is important. i think it's a mechanism the brain uses program back into a situation. but there is a risk. if it takes over too much of your life you can be consuming. i am a strange from my parents in that circumstance is really hard that led to the outcome. after that happened i was full of rage. every beautiful memory from a childhood turn to ride. i became a person who had no beautiful memories. whose whole life was rage. . .

wonderful things about him. so i think it is a delicate balance because i would never want to take the good things about them and say i am only going to focus on the good and dismiss the bad because you let yourself get hurt or someone else. but you don't want to obsess over the bad either. so there's this kind of mental integrity which just means to me no one can take away from me but good but no one can obscure the bad. so i just want to live in my own head and have a grasp on that

reality as it is and i don't want to get consumed with anger but i don't want to expose myself to risk. this sounds extremely evolved. are you in therapy or have you come to this on your own? >> guest: i had to come to it on my own, but i've done a lot of therapy. therapy is really helpful. it never feels like it is, it's never feels hopeful that it is because you set aside the time to think about how you feel and i spent a lot of time in therapy thinking about how angry i feel. being cathartic i didn't think it would be, but it was because

for one thing it would be hard to write about which was more traumatic. i feel like before i started writing i reconciled with the bad things in my life. i had a violent older brother and feel like i kind of reconciled in that. but i haven't reconciled or the beautiful things, the way the mountain books, my mother would laugh for the good things about my father and about my older brother. i think those were the things i loved about my childhood of the most. and it was horrid, that was the hardest thing being close to these things i was never going to have again and that ended up being the hardest thing to write about what a good thing because it let me reclaim a bit of that in a strange way. >> host: is there anything that was particularly hard to write that surprised you? >> guest: there were a couple

of moments about my dad that were hard to write about and where my brother saved my life. i was on a horse that went completely deserved and he was on one that had never had a writer before. i got my foot caught in the saddle and it was on the hillside with ravines everywhere and it was a matter of time before i fell off and was dragged. my brother somehow on this completely unbroken horse slowed it down and this was the brother who was quite violent and manipulative and controlling and bloated at other times twist may rest behind my back and call me a whore. it was always tempting to say he is kind and can be wonderful.

i still think that but i don't want to use those things to dismiss the fact he can be manipulative, cruel and even violent. >> host: i was wondering if it was hard for you to talk about. >> host: i had to put down the book because it was hard to read, psychologically violent as well. i found the psychologically think people tried not to do witthephysical very much. if you are going to distort it and convince them of two things.

people tend to internalize that kind of guilt, that the first thing is hard. my brother was pretty good at it and in a matter of minutes could convince me that something had not happened that happened two minutes before and he could convince me to have a completely different interpretation. one example when i was 17 i brought this man home, charlie and after thanksgiving dinner by brother felt the need to demonstrate his control over me in front of this person so before the meal started he grabbed me by my hair and pulled me down the hallway and shoved my head in the toilet. later when it was all over he told me that they had just been a game and next time we were having fun i should be sure to tell him if i was in any pain because he said i thought you were having a good time.

i completely took the perspective on board so much so i tried to convince charlie of it. he knew what he had seen but i think that he also knew reality had no bearing on me and he could see how much undermined the first hour i was and he tried to reason with me for a while and then defen didn't. there was another incident a couple of month's later and i think going to the university helps me. a few months later it happened again. my brother attacked me in a parking lot and when it was all over he came into my room and said i'm sorry we were just having a good time and i have no idea that i hurt you so next time we are having fun make sure that you speak up if you are in any pain. after he left i was writing in

my journal and i wrote i didn't know which version to believe, that i wrote down that i had been terrified and in pain. i wrote that i would have torn him apart. so i have these in my mind and at that moment i didn't necessarily say mine is right and his is wrong but i knew that i hadn't experienced this as a game and it was an important moment because i didn't immediately see my reality as someone else's. at the end of the process there were still two distinct minds presentpresent bought one havind control over another. it's almost like this is your experience and there were times before that you include in your book where yo you've are still engaging in reality and you say things like he was so much nicer

to me before he had the accide accident. you say before the accident as if h we were playing this game with your self. >> guest: he had a really serious head injury, he felt when he was working for my father and it was a very serious head injury. he nearly died. i had revised when the accident took place because we expected he might be violent after the accident, but somehow in my mind i told myself it happened when i was young and that explained everything. it was when i was writing the book i got my own journal and talked with my brothers have also kept journals. it turned out it happened when i was much older i think when i was seven or 16 and that doesn't

explain any of it because it has been going on for so much longer. that was hard. even that night when things happened i had e-mails i wrote to him that night saying he would never hurt me dot after the head injury or before, but he was never hurt me and i was writing this with a broken toe, my interest was in a sling. i think it is hard to underestimate how that reality distortion is. it's not just the person experiencing it at anyone in proximitif anyone inproximity ts is in some degree subject to the reality that goes on to justify it and enabling them.

putting this book together it seems like it involves interviewing with a lot of people and putting together a lot of different forces and trying to figure out the difference of what happened. what are your thoughts on that and on the reliability of your own memory having done all this? >> guest: you don't want to prove or rely on your merr memot you don't want to rely on people coming in and my family culture had a culture of justifying, rationalizing and denying things as they were happening. and i think that we were so affected by it that it became difficult. but luckily my brothers were wonderful, they were helpful and it's nice, in-laws are wonderful things because they come in from the outside and see things

through different eyes and they are a lot less vulnerable to those distortions, but it happens. i think sometimes the stories that spring up maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong but it can tell you quite a bit. >> host: you touch on this as well explicitly actually, you talk about your father's health. there are things you experience first-hand what we'd wan would e to believe there was instability anat this moment you are in a class and you hear about bipolar disorder. this kinthis kind turns on the n your mind and you think this sounds like my father. >> guest: i thought you just havhad to be a raving lunatic.

witwhat class did is give me another category, another way to think about the brain. i am not a medical professional. i have no idea, but i do feel like there is a gap in fact that my father loves me and yet we could be so terribly hurt by things he did physically especially. there were some irrational decisions about the way he chose to do things and i know that it was not malicious, so having that other category helped me understand that sometimes people do the best they can and that doesn't mean everything is okay. >> host: does it provide some kind of comfort it seems as if when you were a child.

hearing this kind of outside legal or perspective in the mental health perspective on this helps so much. it helps to go back and experience about. i think it is an important step of healing to let yourself off the hook for those feelings you've been carrying around. >> host: if you could talk to your self when you were ten is that something that you would say in particular to your self? >> guest: this is going to be cynical to your heartfelt question. i don't think there's anything that anyone could have said to me that would have made any difference. when charles said something to

me about my brother, we ended up breaking up because i was just too dysfunctional to be in a relationship and one of the things he said to me he basically said i'm just a kid in high school but this is out of minor-league. i think that is true i don't think there's anything i can say or anybody else would say to myself that would move the needle at all. i think it's something i had to come to us with. it was a difficult position and there were a lot of years i was searching every story, film, novel for permission to cut my father out of my life and eventually i kind of realized no one is going to give that permission. you have to give it to your self. >> host: one thing tha that gets changed or passedidchange our p, tyler. the first time is when he

introduced you to music and showed college is a possibility. it probably wasn't even in the future of your ideas. >> guest: my parents especially my dad had a strong belief that women are at home, i thought i would get married at 17, 18 or 19, have a house on the farm, kid. that was kind of old-school, maybe be a midwife like my mother. that's how i felt my life would go until i was 16 and my older brother, tyler, who educated himself and got into a university came home and said i think that you should try this. >> host: you are outside of your family for the first time and on your own for the first time when you never stepped foot into the classroom before.

can you talk a little bit about those earlier days and what that must have been like. >> guest:. i'd never spent ani've never sph what i would call public school kids. i've never been friends with mainstream so they lived in this way they were very observant because they drink coke or the women with occasionally where it came top around the apartment and things like that. i was just appalled. i didn't necessarily enter into a scholarship immediately because it was a bit weird that i didn't have the best hygiene. my dad always taught us, my

mother's mother used to get after him for not washing his hands and he would say to her i don't teach my kids to wash their hands after they go to the bathroom, i teach them not to piss on their hands and i thought that was a great philosophy which my new roommates did not. i was confused because i would go back to idaho and have all of my mainstream friends. he is standing next to a car and

rather than taking it off the other way he does it with a cutting torch and the sparks make it to the fuel tank which he hasn't drained and the car explodes. he was burned horribly. the whole upper half of his body, so many third-degree burn. my family made the decision to treat it at home. and i remember they used the salve that my mother had, and they have no morphine. he almost died. for the moment i thought he had died in a kind of closed my eyes and started praying and started to say goodbye and that i was sorry about our relationship, but he didn't die. even though he didn't die, there were months of this healing process in so much pain. the whole time i was at war with myself. i didn't know whether i thought they were right and that this is what god wanted them to do or whether they were in same and

torturing him for no reason. that is a huge step that you experience when you see a different perspective. i talk about the holocaust and how i was kind of shocked about that and were there other examples you can remember the things looking back your kind of embarrassed that you didn't know then? all those stories where someone is talking about queen and you think they are talking about the queen. i did a lot of smiling and nodding. i never heard of the civil rights movement and i had heard of slavery but i definitely learned it from a very different perspective i think then reading

accounts of slavery that is eye-opening for me because i never had a perspective that it was the civil rights movement that blew my mind that that happened. it's very recent and that did really well my mind. >> host: you end up going to cambridge but let's go to trinity first. did you have an experience when you were there. there's a prograthere is a progo cambridge and he told me to

apply and then i didn't get in. he wrote them and said i think this person is learning a lot. she will catch up and you should give her a chance, and they did. so i owe him a lot for that. >> host: have you talked to him about that and what he saw in you? >> guest: i can't think of a comfortable way. >> host: you didn't do that interview for the book. [laughter] >> guest: no, i didn't. but while abroad for the first time you describe the syndrome like i don't belong here. but there seems to be a turning point where you start hearing about positive liberty in all these different ideas. at some point you write in the

book. i didn't belong in the comments i was interested in the idea and i was learning. i was really interested in and i was going through a lot of changes. so it was my first week when i came to cambridge as an actual student, so i applied and then i got an end to my first week i went to a lecture and it blew my mind because the whole point of the negative and liberty is yes there are external obstacles people have to keep you from doing things but positive liberty says there are obstacles if you are tired of you may not be able to go outside but also if you believe that someone

outside is going to shoot you and there isn't someone like that it doesn't matter whether or not you still can go outside so this idea of what might be the most important thing in determining how much freedom and ability you have, that might be in your own mind, but that never occurred to me. it was around this time a friend of mine sent me a song by someone i never heard of, bob marley. i got obsessed with death. -- i got obsessed with that eric. i read about how these doctors have told him that he needed to amputate a toe but he had a rastafarian belief in the whole body and what happened when he died and he was young. when i was reading that, i realized that i had stopped

believing in my dad's view of doctors and hospitals. i told myself i had another guy never hato know thati never had. and i called and i got them, i got all of them. i left the hospital looking like a pin cushion. it took me quite a long time to convince the nurse i really needed all of them. but yes it was a moment i had that old worldview they haven't found thbut i haven'tfound the n this new one. >> host: there is a moment when you do find the courage and that happens after he completesy painted finishes you from the family. >> guest: my sister and i have experienced something with my brother and she told me i should come to my parents, and i decided i would so i told them it was an issue and we needed to deal with it. my father decided that i was

lying and he said i was trying to destroy the family. my mothe mother said maybe i way and my memories couldn't be trusted. that was hard but i think the hardest thing was after that they called my brother and told him everything i had said and what followed was the period of the above threat. he called and said he hired an assassin to come and kill me and then he cut me out of this lifee and disowned me and my parents supported the decision and that christmas they said you are not allowed to come home because it will make your brother uncomfortable. >> host: as the reader i was most upset by your mother in that situation. i felt there was an opportunity when you approached your mother about these things and she seemed to be of equal mind. >> guest: we had a chat online when i first started talking to her about it and she said i can

see this now and of course this is happening. we are going to help you and take care of it and get you into therapy. it's going to be okay. she apologized to me and said she was sorry. but when my father took the position he did, she followed suit. >> host: this culminates with the blessing that your father offers you in a bar at harvard and you declined by the blessing. can you talk to me a little bit about that because that's where you're kind of education comes full circle in a way. >> guest: my brother could be out of his life and i was ostracized for about ten months. i was doing a fellowship and my father came to visit me which was surprising because my dad

hates traveling and liberals. they had only been there for a few days and what that looked like they believe i was possessed and that's why i said the things i said so they were going to offer me this blessing as a kind of exorcism and if i could just go along with it, then i could say that i didn't mean what i said. i could trade out their memories for my. that was the period of a couple of days we were sightseeing around boston pretending to be a happy family when i kind of thought i could make a bargain because i thought it was a good deal. i was arguing with myself trying to convince myself it was some dignity in denying my own memories and my own perception. and that they would be justified

somehow. i thought it was a deal i could make that the night before i left, they offered me a blessing and i couldn't do it. there were a couple of things i realized in that moment. first the thought that my father had come to reclaim just didn't exist anymore. i have gained a whole different perspectives and different mind frolinefrom the studying python. that's mind i had had no tolerance. i couldn't surrender to it. it was clear to me that of course i had been the one that said it wasn't a demon but said those things it was me. that was me. and with my father had tried to cast doubt was me. >> host: i want to end this with a final reading at the end of the book but i think brings this all full circle and back to

the education that you were able to achieve through this experience. i thought i dog ear it, but naturally i didn't. no matter how much i appeared to have changed, how illustrative my education and altered by experience, i was still her. two people, fractured mind, she was inspired and emerged on a after i crossed the threshold of my fathers house. that night i called on her and she didn't answer. she left me. she stayed. the decisions i made after that moment were not the ones she would have been. they were the choices of a changed person. you could call this many things, transformation, metamorphosis, the trail. i call it an education. >> host: thank you so much for writing this exceptional book.

>> guest: thank you. i am the outreach and development coordinator at the university of illinois press on behalf of the director and our entire staff i want to thank you all for being here today as a part of this remarkable event. we've partnered with the library in order to kick off a year filled with workshops, panels, existence and more. today's panel is a particularly important one to us. we are with our korean director joined by the two previous in that position. to add some context to the event i will share w y