Day 17: Tara Westover's Memoir

"I could have my mother's love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth" (p. 322). 

The family narrative was created to mask the truth of mental illness and the abuse of the two girls. Westover was expected to uphold that narrative or be shunned and ejected from the family. When she told the truth, her parents and brothers declared she must be insane. As a result, she doubted her sanity. "I felt a relentless desire to ask people to verify whether they were seeing what I was seeing. Is this book blue? I wanted to ask. Is that man tall?" (p. 294). 

I couldn't put the book down. I found it tender, sometimes very funny, and always recognizable. I know those patterns, have lived them. I know the courage it takes to declare your truth in the face of a parent and a knot of relatives who swear that what you remember never happened. Westover describes how difficult it is for a child to establish "reality" when a parent alternates between grandiosity and paranoia, depression and divine inspiration, and when everyone else in the family conspires to validate that parent's ever-shifting and unpredictable view.