YouSaid · the spoken record

Tara Westover

lines on the record: 80
first: 2019-05-06
most recent: 2019-05-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think I would realize it one minute and then the next day deny it. I mean, it was a really unstable understanding of that relationship. I would say right up until I confronted my parents about it. And initially they believed me. My mother especially initially she believed me. And then later they decided when my dad didn't believe me, they both announced that I was lying and ultimately possessed. And even then, there was a whole couple of year period, two years maybe. Sometimes I would think I was crazy. I really did. I just thought, maybe I don't know. Maybe it wasn't so bad and maybe it's okay and I'm overreacting. What's interesting?”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, that was the difference. My friends that I was meeting at Brigham Young University, if someone called them a whore, they would cry and I wouldn't. I was completely cut off from my own feelings. And it took me quite a long time to figure out that all these things that my brother was doing, that them not affecting me, that actually was the effect they were having, just being turned off from myself and the just shutting down.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He called me that sometimes joking and sometimes when he was angry. Again, I was comfortable with it. I mean, this is a strange thing to say. Was trying to figure out I knew I wasn't emotionally healthy and I knew I'd been damaged. I remember thinking constantly aware that I'd been damaged in some way. But I didn't know what was the difference between me and the other women I was starting to meet. You know, these kind of mainstream, normal, cheerful Mormon women, and I was living with them. And it would have been my freshman year. I'd been telling myself for a really long time that I was okay because nothing my brother did affected me, nothing he could do or say had no effect on me. And I think it was realizing that”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my older brother. He was a complicated person, as you said. He could be really kind. He could be really insightful. He saved my life a number of times in the junkyard. He saved it. He saved it when we were breaking horses together. But he also could be incredibly cruel, manipulative, controlling. He had a self-hatred of himself that he would just he could really make you feel the way about yourself that he felt about him, about it himself. And then I think a lot of times that manifested as violence or in insulting words or emotional abuse and a lot of violence.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I understood that about me, but I think I more understood the historical role of it. And I think at that point in my life, if I'm being honest with you, I was comfortable being demeaned myself, but I was uncomfortable with the history of that word. And I think it was an evolution. I do think learning to think about why other people shouldn't be treated a certain way is a step that you take on the way to learning that you shouldn't be treated a certain way either. So it's almost the other way you said it. I think I was comfortable with him using language like that about me. I was not comfortable with it once I understood it.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Word, I think, kind of to hold me in place, he'd meant it, I think, to remind me that I wasn't good. And strangely, every time he said it that whole summer, I just remembered that class and remembered the experience of learning about history and how my family was just one little family playing out a role in this conflict that we were either willfully ignorant of or accidentally ignorant, but it didn't necessarily matter. We were still I ultimately decided we were foot soldiers in a conflict that we either didn't understand or didn't want to understand. And that was something I felt”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think realizing how bad things had been and how recent it had been, and stories like not just Rosa Parks, but the really hard stories, like the Emmett Till stories, which I think are the stories that for white people are less in their mind, it's always so much more comfortable to tell the stories of triumph and stories that have a nice ending. Oh, we immortalized her and it was all fine. And we don't like as much to talk about the really hard, painful ones. But for me when I went and heard those stories, I then went home and I'm working in my father's junkyard and same thing happens. My face, because I've got oil on my hands and my brother sees me, and the same thing plays the same tape that played a thousand times in my life. And I had always responded casually to that. And suddenly, it really hit me. And he had meant that way.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called the American Founding, and we had that book. And it's the only history book I really read. Again, I can't absolve myself completely. I read that as a kid and thought, okay, fine. And just plow it on with my life. And it wasn't until I got into that class that suddenly I thought, oh, this is different than I thought it was. And then that was shocking. And then the civil rights movement was shocking because for me, it wasn't just that the civil rights movement happened, but the date. I remember that date when he first put it up on the screen and he said, you know, 1860, 1963. And I thought, surely you mean 1863. Like, weren't we dealing with this hundred years before? And how is this still happening?”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had read this terrible book that my dad had in the house that basically said slavery was a terrible, really onerous, difficult institution for the slave owners, really hard on them. I don't defend what book was that?”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew it wasn't a compliment, and I knew to what he referred to. I didn't know the history, I get. I mean, I had no knowledge of, I don't know if I just never thought about it, but I can't absolve myself completely. There was a whole period of my life where he called me that and I would smile and laugh and think it was fine. And then I went to BYU and I took this class. And the idea that I had about slavery was completely different from what I was shown in that class. Because”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did. You know, you can't absolve yourself too much in a way I think I must have known. I knew that he called me that. I worked in the junkyard and I would get black on my hands and I would brush my hair out of my face because it was windy and then he would call me that. And I must have known on some level. I don't think I knew it was.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that thinking about the world from another person's point of view is incredibly difficult. And I think it is what an education is really. And the thing we don't know is, or we don't ever acknowledge, is that respecting other people is actually kind of the first step to respecting yourself. And if you can't have empathy for a life that's different from yours, you're not going to be able to look at your own life from different points of view, which is what you're going to need to do really, I think, to make any change.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I understood that as him saying that she had been arrested for taking, like stealing the seat. I thought she'd stolen it. It was just a misunderstanding of take a seat versus to take a seat. And to me, I had no knowledge of the civil rights movement. I had no knowledge of anything after slavery. It just made way more sense to me that she would be arrested for stealing it. It never would have occurred to me that there would be a time in my country where, you know, in the living memory of my mother, who I thought of as a young woman, that an American could be arrested for sitting down, I still defend my interpretation as making more sense.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. Weirdly, I'd heard of slavery, but I don't think you'd love the version of slavery that I heard. But I had heard of it. And then, no, nothing about the civil rights movement. I remember when the professor started lecturing about Rosa Parks, and he said that she had been arrested for taking a seat on a bus.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I raise my hands and said, hey, what's that word, Holocaust? What is that? And they heard it as a denial of the Holocaust. Like, what is this? And I very much meant, what is this? So I guess if you hadn't heard of the Holocaust,”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say I always believed it. I think I started to disbelieve it almost. I think when I would say my trajectory was very much believing everything my parents told me and then having slight questions when I was a teenager, but it really wasn't until I went to a university and just started experiencing an entire different perspective of the world. And even though I was still fairly radical in my beliefs at the university, there were things I was learning about that made me stop and just question everything. I mean, I learned about the Holocaust when I was at BYU. I raised my hand and I asked what the Holocaust was. I'd never heard of it before, which is not really something I recommend doing. If any of you were thinking about it, don't. Because, of course, the other students in the class, they heard that as a denial. They heard it as anti-Semitism. They heard me say when you add.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like long t-shirts. Your teacher made it an enormous gray sweater, like a giant. So she had had Leotards and Pink Chiffon, and then she had to tell all these little girls. This Christmas were dancing in giant gray sweaters. Which they didn't like so much, but my dad still thought it was immodest because, of course, it didn't go to the floor. So it didn't go down.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He definitely had traditional ideas about women and he had really strict ideas about modesty. I think my dad, it was a lot more tame though than it would be in some of my brothers because they were being raised in that household and then they also take some of that on. So my dad definitely had women aren't ever supposed to work and you have to wear clothes that are, they cover the ankle and pretty extreme modesty ideas. But then my brothers, one of my brothers in particular who I call Sean in the book, would take that a lot further. And I think had a Real hostility for women that would make my relationship with him really dysfunctional.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of patriarchy, I had completely taken on board his beliefs about doctors and hospitals. I thought if I took so much as an aspirin that my children would be deformed, you know, that kind of thing. And I believed all these things. And importantly, there would be moments when I would have a little bit of a difference of opinion. And I always just assumed that I was wrong.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. Such an interesting question. I suppose I had the beliefs that my father had. I don't think there was a lot of difference between his mind and my mind and his perspective on things.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it might have been the first seed of it, but I think the world that you, when you're a child, whatever life you have, whatever world is built for you, that's the only world you've ever lived in. Correct. And you have no way to really evaluate. It just seems normal to you. And so I was 14. I'd never been to school. I wasn't getting any other perspectives. I had the one perspective. My dad's perspective. And whatever he said was pretty much the only point of view I was getting. So I think I was getting to the age where I was maybe ready to start questioning a little, but I was still in a pretty isolated state.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I remember that night. My dad was watching. We'd gotten a TV that year, which was weird. We'd never had one. And he's watching The Honeymooners. He loved that show a lot. And he's watching the honeymooners, and it's like one o'clock in the morning, and I decide to go to bed because I just gave up. The power's on and the water's running, and it's over. And I remember I went to bed. And I looked at him before I left. He just seemed childlike for maybe the second time in my life. I looked at him and he seemed childlike, but also I remember feeling a little bit of frustration at God because I felt like he's been this faithful servant, like Noah. And you've denied him the flood. I remember feeling almost let down about it in a weird way. I mean, I was 14. I was still very much seeing the world the way my father did.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An excessive number of peaches. Yeah. Applesauce for some reason But it separated you from the people that you met, I guess, because”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But even more hostile thinking, this person that I've met, this is my first friend, his name was Charles, remember thinking, he's gonna come to our house and try to take our food. Like, as soon as this changes, this person who seems so nice is going to be dangerous because he's going to be hungry and we're the ones that are going to have food. So there was always that peaches. We had a lot.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought the power would turn off. I thought the water would stop working. We had generators, we had all this food, we had fuel buried in the field, and I thought we're going to need all this. And this is the moment when we're going to need all this. And I was 14 at that time, and I had just, I'd gone out into the community.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, for my dad, it wasn't Y2K. It was like we had Y2K every year for my whole life. So yeah, we were worried about Y2K, but Y2K was one of probably 15 times in my childhood. The dad said, this is it. And then it wouldn't be anything about, well, in the next year will definitely be it. And it just, it was really continuous. But it was something about the different...”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's also the complication of wrestling with other people around you who you love for that narrative, for your own narrative, and do you have a right to your own interpretation of the past and even of the present. But that is how I grew up. And then, of course, I went to university when I was 17. And that was the first time I'd sit foot in a classroom. And things started. You taught you that she was...”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They should be a little worried, but we're actually going to be good. We didn't go to school because my dad didn't believe in public education. We didn't go to the doctor ever because my dad didn't believe in doctors or hospitals. So we had a kind of isolated life. I didn't have a birth certificate until I was nine. I'm not 100% sure of my birthday. So it was a different kind of life. And yet it did have these kind of beautiful elements. And as I grew up and grew older, I mean a lot of what I was writing about is there was a way that I experienced my childhood as a child. And then you grow up and you have to decide what you think of that as an adult.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there were beautiful elements of it. The mountain was really beautiful, for example. My mother was an herbalist and a midwife, and when I was a child that had a kind of magical quality, you know, she could heal in a way that to me seemed like a magician. And it was adventurous. My dad was telling us that there was going to be this apocalyptic event, possibly a war with the federal government. We were canning food. We were getting ready. And that was exciting, even if it was a bit scary. In a lot of ways, I think I didn't experience it as fear so much. I thought we were going to be fine. We had 10 years of food. It was everybody else.”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting way to put it. I think I would put it differently, but with the same kind of general thrust, I guess. For me, I think it was a little bit about rejecting the past, but it was also about trying to find the parts of the past that were important to me that I wanted to hold on to and the good memories that I wanted to have and I wanted to keep and the positive feelings about people in my life that had been good to me while also kind of reconciling with the more negative things and trying to think how do I move forward with both of those things, you know, with the fact that I had a relationship with my family that was in some ways beautiful and loving and in some ways chaotic and destructive and trying to take the good and move forward with it but also not really allowing the bad to dominate the future if that makes sense”
2019-05-06 · Oprah's Super Soul · Tara Westover: Educated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source