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5 OMG How did she end up alive and educated? stars

[News flash: I see that this review is WAY too long! I’m such a blabbermouth! Feel free to skip sections. I went way overboard. Geez��.]

Tara did a lot more than ride a pogo stick to get from a junkyard in Idaho to a Ph.D. in Cambridge.
Meanwhile, I’m bouncing on mine, going high and far to escape her whacked-out father and super-scary psycho brother. Plus, face it, I bring out the pogo stick when it’s a fantastic read and believe me, this qualifies. Holy moly what a tough and bizarro life this amazing woman has had, and oh what a writer!

She looks normal, whatever that means.
I was so jazzed after reading this book, I went online and watched every interview with Tara that I could find (and there are many; I’ve added a few at the end of this review). I just had to see and hear this woman, this woman who had a strange, horrendous, and dangerous childhood and lived to tell about it—and so eloquently. She’s only in her 20s—so young to be so successful. From the interviews, I see that she happens to be articulate, quick-witted, and confident, and she totally passes for normal, whatever that is. On the outside, you don’t see the scars, the scars that have to exist on her psyche after the hellacious childhood she endured.

Spare me the scenery, I want the juice!
I didn’t love this book for the first half hour or so of reading; I thought I was in deep do-do. Again, it’s that damn description—which just isn’t my style. The book opens with Tara describing the beauteous mountain that she grew up on. It was perfectly written; a creative writing teacher would have been damn proud of her. But I was screaming inside, “This is a memoir! Tell your story!! Give me some juice! Tell me what happened and how you feel. Save the mountain business for a poem, will you please?�� Ha, the mountain was affecting me too—I didn’t like it because it was this giant barricade blocking me from feeling anything about this writer or her story.

Luckily, the mountain talk stopped and then I got pulled in real fast. And as I got into the story and forgave her for her brief stint with DD (description disorder, which some writers are afflicted with), I have to admit I sort of liked that she described the mountain and her love for it. The mountain gave her some feeling of safety and peace, and its beauty stayed with her as she trekked to places far away to get her education.

Refraining from spilling all the beans.
I could sit here and write a Cliffs Notes version of her life, just because I’m so excited to share it, but I’ll try to put a sock in it (one of the two that were knocked off my feet by the power of this story) because you really need to experience this book all for yourself.

Dad buried gas and guns.
Tara is the youngest of seven kids, all raised in the mountains of Idaho by a madman father who was a religious fanatic and believed the end of the world was coming. He buried gas and guns so that they could survive after the end came. He thought the government, schools, and medicine were all bull—and dangerous. It was all about God’s will and Satan’s grip. He was charismatic and forceful.

Although Tara doesn’t think of it as a cult, it sure seemed like a family cult to me, with her dad as the far-out leader. He brainwashed all of them. She says she’ll always have to stop and question whether what he said was true.

They are Mormons, but the type of religion is beside the point. Dad is an extremist, that’s all we need to know. Tara says right up front that the book is not about Mormons. I absolutely hate religious rantings, but luckily no one is pushing the religion; Tara is just telling us what it was like around her house. Tara doesn’t talk about her religious beliefs today; I’m mildly curious. At the time, she believed everything he said.

The state didn’t know Tara existed.
Tara doesn’t have a birth certificate and doesn’t know her birthday--just an approximation. How weird would that be? She was born at home and her father didn’t register her existence because he didn’t want the government to make her go to school. When she is seven, she says:

“…When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist.��

Burns and gashes and raccoon eyes.
I will say that this memoir reads like fiction. It’s hard to believe that it’s not. Expect to bite your lip and grimace and scream inside as you read detailed descriptions of MANY accidents that happened to Tara and her family members. Burns and gashes and raccoon eyes and brains hitting concrete. Some people say that she probably misremembered or exaggerated, but I say you don’t make up seeing your brother’s brain peeking out of his skull. How did they all stay alive?

Psycho bro.
And then there’s the mental and physical torture that her psycho brother Shawn inflicted on Tara and others. Oh, he’s a cutie all right. He broke her fingers, put her head in the toilet—normal stuff like that. If there was ever a need for a therapist��.

Doesn’t every kid risk their life working in a junkyard?
Tara doesn’t play the victim. And she doesn’t hate her family—which at first seems hard to believe. But she says her life seemed normal to her: she had nothing to compare it to, for one. All kids must help their fathers work; her dad just happened to own a junkyard with dangerous equipment. How could she know that other families didn’t get injured all the time? How did she know that other families went to hospitals instead of using herbs to cure everything? (Her mom is an accomplished herbalist.)

And she knew her parents loved her and meant well. Dad couldn’t help it that he was crazy. He did the best he could. So despite growing up in this intense, isolated family with a mad father, an abusive brother, horrific accidents, and a fear of the apocalypse, she doesn’t think she had a terrible childhood-- and she has many good memories. Wow.

Isn’t Europe a country?
Her formal education began when she was 17 when, after studying on her own for the ACT exams, she got into Brigham Young University. Before this, she had never stepped foot in a classroom. She had never heard of the Holocaust or the civil rights movement. She thought Europe was a country. She didn’t think to read her textbooks; she thought she was supposed to just look at the pictures. Despite this, she ended up at Cambridge. She says getting an education is not about making money, but about making a person.

Hell-bent on getting educated.
I identify with her being hell-bent on getting educated and knowing she had to do it herself. My parents wouldn’t send me to college (they wanted me to be a flight attendant, but they did worry I was too short). I had an intense drive to go to college. I went to the library to find out which city had the most colleges and that was Boston, with 58 of them! When I was 18, I moved there, determined to get accepted into one that I could afford (I did.) But wait, I must stick to Tara’s story. I just wanted to say that I identified with her drive and her success in getting through college. (Ha, I wasn’t anywhere near as smart as her; I certainly didn’t end up at Cambridge University!)

Her education (for her, an awakening) included taking psych courses. She realized then that her dad was probably mentally ill, and this knowledge allowed her to forgive him. He couldn’t help being scary, controlling, and fanatical. And he didn’t purposely put her in harm’s way in the junkyard; he just didn’t have the ability to see danger.

Psych classes also helped her become super self-aware. I loved the parts in the book where she analyzes herself. One thing she talked about was gaslighting—the process of people denying your reality and making you feel crazy. For example, this happened when she tried to tell her parents what her psycho brother had done to her. Although her mom first believed her, she soon changed her tune and sided with Tara’s father, denying that such bad things happened. Tara says she started doubting her sanity—which has to be scary. She says she had a breakdown at one point. Not surprising.

Run, Tara, run!
The only frustrating thing about her book is watching her return, time and time again, to visit her family. Quick, Tara, jump on my back as we pogo-stick on out of there! NOW! Psycho, sadistic bro Shawn is just too damn scary! He cranked it up a notch every time she visited, and I was scared he would seriously mess her up—break a bigger bone, give her brain damage, throw her off the mountain, something really bad.

Part of her need to return was to win her family’s approval (and Shawn just happened to live there too, so there was no escaping him). But she also wanted to expose Shawn and to warn them about him, since he was attacking other people too.

Plus, people who live together a long time get imprinted on each other. We can’t underrate how much the existence of a history ties people together. I think the only way she would have severed ties would be if there had been sexual abuse.

The skeptics.
Some critics doubt whether her story is true, or they think it’s exaggerated. She admits that we can’t always believe our memories, that they are tricky. To try to make her story as accurate as possible, she looked back through her journals. Usually journals are full of fact, not fiction, so I believe it’s a good source for her truth. Also, a couple of her brothers have corroborated her memories.

I don’t think she made this stuff up. I’m not sure you can make this stuff up, especially the level of detail she gave for injuries and reactions to injuries. I buy her story—hook, line, and sinker.

Her interviews are factual, analytical. In fact, she’s a little stoical. She seems to have intellectualized her trauma, which is a common defense mechanism. I’m probably just full of it, but I’m thinking that if she were a storyteller who wants to wow her audience with a wild story, she’d appear more animated, less analytical. She’d want to dwell on the juice, which she doesn’t do. In the longer interviews, she discusses her philosophy on education—not the kind of stuff that makes an audience wriggle in glee. I think of her as a reporter—she reports on the madness but she also reports on the scenery (remember the mountain talk that I didn’t love at first). She isn’t interested in creating fiction.

Airing dirty laundry.
There are a few scathing 1-star reviews on Amazon by family members and friends of the family. They say that most of what Tara says isn’t true, that the family is wonderful and not so isolated, that Tara’s dad helped fund her college. Tara even says in her book that he helped her out financially. He didn’t want her to go to college, but he didn’t prevent it either.

These negative reviews say that Tara is unstable (let me say that in interviews, she does not in any way appear or sound weird). Of course they would say that. What self-respecting family wouldn’t be pissed at someone airing their dirty laundry? And again, it’s that memory thing. Put a bunch of siblings in a room and ask them about something that happened in their childhood, and they’ll all have a different memory of it. Plus there’s the truth that every sibling has a unique relationship and experience with their parents and with each other.

At this point, most of Tara’s family (parents and a few sibs) have shunned her. I’m sure that not having her family’s support is killing her; a family has such power over you. No one wants their family to shun them. Luckily, she is close to a couple of brothers. In the book, she gives them credit for helping her.

It’s not a woman, it’s a pencil!
Now for some silly cover talk. For the longest time, I thought this was an artsy cover showing the back of a woman. She has this little head with long dark hair, and she’s wearing a red skirt that’s way bigger than her head. Then, what? OMG, it’s not a woman, it’s a pencil!! Very clever! Days pass before I see that there’s a little person standing on the pencil! It’s supposed to look like a girl standing on a mountain side, like Tara and her mountain. Wow! What an enticing and cool cover.

Check out her interviews:
Here are a few of the interviews I liked. (Warning: The one in Cambridge is really long.):







Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.