I saw this book on Bill Gates' reading list and was intrigued for two reasons: one because he raved about it and because it was the story of a Mormon woman from Eastern Idaho - which in my heart is still my home. Leila rightly teases me a little because when someone asks me where I am from I almost always say that I am from Teton, ID, but I have not lived in Teton since I was 11 years old. I spent my teenage years in Boise, and my grandparents both lived in Nampa. My mom and siblings still live in Boise and I am sure that if you ask them where we are from, it is Boise. But for some reason I can't articulate, in my heart, I am still from Teton, ID.
I haven't lived in Idaho for over 20 years. In 1995, I moved to Provo, UT to go to school at BYU, like the author of the book. Unlike her though, I was not raised in an isolated homeschool environment. I got a superb education at Boise High - we had many teachers with PhDs, took all the AP courses I could handle, and lived on campus of BSU when my mom was a student. I was most comfortable and happy in a classroom. We moved from Provo to Texas where I worked on my PhD after finishing my masters at BYU. Then we moved to Indiana, then Iowa, and now St. Louis.
My life was very different from Tara Westover's - although there are some connections. Her brother Travis was in our stake in Indiana where he was working on a PhD and we were friends with some of the same people. I am pretty sure that I met him at some point, but don't remember any conversation we would have had. She went to BYU, but long after I graduated and our home life was not the same at all. I felt reading this book though some kinship with her - maybe because we both leveraged education to build our lives, and also because even though my life is very far from that of my childhood in Teton I can't really shake it. Somehow, for the rest of my life, no matter where I move or what I do, I will still be the kid from Teton.
Her writing in this book is compelling, and I appreciated her treatment of memory and its complicated relationship with the truth. She has some pretty strong memories of the time when her brother was burned severely helping her father in the junkyard. She remembers him alone coming to the house and he does not. He remembers their father helping him and the entire event is different from her telling. I tell a lot of stories to my kids about when I grew up and I bet if my siblings were here they would contradict many of the details. I don't know why memory is so malleable, but I really do believe that we must have grown up in alternate realities. That was driven home when I met my Dad in Hawaii after not seeing him for years and years. His memory of what happened when he left us, was contradictory to mine. It hurt to hear a version of the past that absolved him of some of the blame and put it on us.
I have thought about writing a book - part popular science and part memoir about quinoa and my short time in Bolivia and studying quinoa and pairing that with the rise of quinoa as a superfood and an international household word. But I worry about the reliability of my memory - not that I have any neurological problem, but that it is affected by the telling. That by building a story that is compelling and rich that I am overwriting the more complex reality and that once that story is told the original memory is deleted. I think it is a compelling story to tell, but it does change with the telling.
