One morning, when Tara Westover sits in the college library at Cambridge, feeling a fraud, her friend Drew sends her a song via email. She listens and is gripped.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery

None but ourselves can free our mind.

The irony of these lines is that their author, Bob Marley, had held to his Rastafarian belief in a whole body, and refused amputation of a cancerous toe; he had died a year after he wrote those words. He becomes, to Tara, a symbol of herself; she has renounced her father’s world, but has not found the courage to live fully in the world beyond it — of freedom of thought, opportunity, self-definition. She has not found the courage to amputate her family (especially her father’s tyranny) from her definition of herself. Only when she does so will she be able to emancipate herself.

It is difficult, almost impossible, to write a meaningful, succinct review about this extraordinary book. But then, I imagine a voice saying, “if I could write my impossible life, you should be able to write a review of my story of it!” And indeed, I believe it must have felt impossible for Westover to write her story, considering she is still in her early thirties, and the book ends soon after she graduated with a PhD when she was twenty-seven. Considering that she started her university education at age seventeen, after years of little or no schooling, and no reading apart from the scriptures and her father’s Mormon tracts.

I’ve read it twice, and the second time it gripped me sooner and harder than it had on the first reading. Now, looking at the big picture, I see that there are two strands: Tara’s psychological struggle to emerge from the prison that was her family, and her intellectual struggle, to get an education, to begin to think for herself instead of accepting her father’s word as law. The two are intertwined, of course. The intellectual transformation begins when she decides, at her brother Tyler’s urging, to sit for the entrance exam that will allow her to go to college. Tara had believed that college was irrelevant; that she would marry at age eighteen or nineteen, settle on a corner of the farm, help her mother with her herbal remedies and midwifery practice, and have children of her own. This was the role of a woman who lived within the Mormon faith.

But it is the Mormon faith with a twist; her father is a fundamentalist survivalist, who believes that the End of Days is coming, that the government, the health care system, and the educational institutions are part of Satan’s conspiracy against God, and that the only way to live in God’s light and truth is to store up provisions, to be fully armed, and to avoid schools and hospitals and government regulations. So when Tara decides to take her brother’s advice, she has to educate herself from scratch in English, science and maths.

Meantime, she works in her father’s scrapyard, in hard, dirty, dangerous conditions, and is often put at great risk of injury or death by her father’s reckless, driven energy. Her brother Shawn is both her protector and her tormentor. His close and tender bond with Tara, his ‘Siddle Lister’ (little sister) changes as she reaches puberty, and he begins to accuse her of being a whore. Gifted with a beautiful voice and natural musicality, she takes part in several musicals put on in town (surprisingly, her father allows her to do this) and when Shawn sees her talking with a boy and applying makeup, he calls her a whore. One morning early, she wakes from sleep to find his hands gripping her throat. He drags her into the kitchen; she falls to the floor, he grabs her and twists her body into a lock, demanding that she admit she is a whore. She is saved on this occasion by her brother Tyler, who unexpectedly returns home, confronts Shawn, and tosses Tara his car keys so she can escape.

This is one of many horrific episodes. Each time, Shawn apologises afterwards. His violence, cruelty, and volatility are intensified after a horrific accident when he falls from a pallet twenty feet in the air, onto a half-finished concrete wall, hitting it head first. He survives, more damaged than ever.

Tara goes to Brigham Young University, where she is completely at sea at first. Her worst faux pas is to ask a professor what the word Holocaust means. And so her real education begins.

Meanwhile, her struggle to find her own truth, to break free of her father’s tyranny, her mother’s compliance with his authority and complicity in his injustices and abuses, and of Shawn’s brutal, unpredictable love-hate hold over her, comes to the fore whenever she returns home on vacation, and is forced to work again in the scrap yard, until finally she finds the courage to walk away.

Even after she has won a scholarship to Cambridge and discovered the delights of culture, history, philosophy, the great thinkers, she continues to doubt herself. A turning point comes when she discovers the forerunners of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, and confronts her own ingrained understanding that the male is the decider, the female is the one to be called to order. That to want to be a decider was unnatural, perverted. Then she reads Mill’s sentence, that “Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known.”

Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman.

From then on, slowly and haltingly, she begins to define herself. Back home, she loses, gives in, in a series of confrontations with Shawn, when her parents collude to deny his violence and Shawn threatens her with death. Again and again, her own reality is shaken, twisted, almost strangled by the family myth: that her father is a prophet inspired by God, her mother is a divinely inspired healer, Shawn has been cleansed by the Atonement of Christ and is a new man, and she, Tara, because she will not accept her father’s offer of a priesthood blessing, is evil and damned.

She survives all this and a breakdown, has counselling for a year at university, pulls herself out of the pit, wins entrance to Harvard, and completes her PhD. She has lost her family, but she has gained an education. She spent two years enumerating her father’s flaws, justifying her decision to cut him from her life, but the guilt remained; until she accepted her decision on its own terms:

Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.
It was the only way I could love him.

She leaves behind forever the sixteen-year-old self she saw in the mirror the night Shawn had threatened her with a knife, the child imprisoned by the family myths.

That night, in no longer identifying, becoming one with, that child, she finds herself.

This is her education. So the two trajectories, the escape from cruelty, ignorance, tyranny, and misguided, domineering love, and emancipation through the intellectual worlds of history, philosophy and art, are completed triumphantly, yet quietly, at great cost.