In this account – Westover’s family dispute her version of events – life is grim in all the ways one might expect. A brother charges into her room while she’s sleeping and fastens his hands around her throat, calling her a whore Muscle testing, for example, is an “act of faith in which God spoke through her fingers”. In the same manner that her child self once did, she seems to accept her mother’s explanations. That all these activities appear somewhat contrary to Mormon religious doctrine is something Westover never explicitly addresses. Eventually, she takes up essential oils, something called muscle testing, and “energy work”. She finds some independence in her roles as a kind of faith healer and as an experienced but apparently unlicensed midwife. “But if you ask, the Lord will tell you!”įaye, Westover’s mother, largely defers to her husband, in spite of what evidently were some doubts about the divinity of his testimony. “Isaiah doesn’t say which is evil, butter or honey,” is how he delivers the good news. (When it did not, the author observes, the “disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this”.) He does not believe in sending his children to school, but does believe that dairy products are sinful, owing to a message from God. Her father Gene was the prophet of their small family, convinced the world was going to end at the stroke of the millennium.
She was born to Mormon fundamentalist parents in Idaho, the youngest of seven. Tara Westover’s memoir is about being from just such a place and people. The people who live there are desperate and pitiable, we are told, just as much as they are brutal and superstitious.
Geographically, these places might be in the middle of the continent, but they are on the periphery of the country’s economic life, and often the social one too. W e hear a lot about the edges of the US these days.
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