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Tara Westover grew up on the side of a secluded mountain in Idaho with her large, mormon family. Due to his religious beliefs and superstition, Tara's father kept his seven children at home instead of allowing them to attend public school. As a result, the first classroom she entered wasn't until Tara was seventeen years old. In her memoir, Tara narrates her experience as a child of a radical, survivalist family and the journey she took to break free from the constraints of her upbringing. Before leaving home, Tara worked alongside her siblings in her father's junkyard, aided her midwife mother, and suffered the physical and emotional abuse of one of her older brothers. After self-studying for the ACT, Tara gained admission to Brigham Young University. However, she didn't end her education there, as she eventually earned a PhD in history from Trinity College. Tara's story teaches the world about the importance of surrounding ourselves with people who support our passions. Educated gives insight into Tara's struggles to break free from the ideals that had been forced upon her from birth by her radically mormon parents.

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Tara Westover's memoir follows her journey away from her extreme survivalist family and presents the challenges she faced due to her upbringing. As she moved out into the mainstream world and away from her radical parents, Tara realized that the beliefs enforced on her from a young age shaped her struggles as an adult.

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In his self-reflective poem, "Alone", Edgar Allan Poe describes the troubles that arose in his childhood due to his tendency to see things in a different light. He is isolated from others in his unique outlook, and this uniqueness causes him sorrow and despair. He ends his poem by comparing himself to the rest of the universe and concludes that he will never break free from his curse.

While Tara Westover ends her story on a higher note than Edgar Allan Poe, readers can relate the journeys of the two writers. The first four lines, in particular, pertain to Westover's origin. Poe narrates, "From childhood's hour I have not been/ As others were- I have not seen/ As others saw- I could not bring/ My passions from a common spring-"(1-4). In a similar manner, Tara explains in her memoir that, as she grew older, her personal beliefs did not align with those of her family. When she decided to pursue an education and go against her father's wishes, she isolated herself to the same degree felt by Poe.

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"Alone" by Edgar Allan Poe | Poetry Foundation

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In response to her daughter's memoir, LaRee Westover released Educating to shine a light on homeschooling, herbal medicine, and living a conservative and Christian way of life. Westover explains how she tailored her homeschooling to fit the different styles of learning of several of her children and describes herself as a teacher at heart. Readers may infer that Tara herself would disagree with the way her mother holds herself in a positive light, as the education Tara received at home did little to prepare her for the outside world. In fact, in a college classroom, she had to ask other students what the Holocaust was.

While she hopes her book "may inspire those who have chosen to live their lives differently from their neighbors," she also realizes that it may upset her daughter. The narrative presented in Educating differs from Tara's memoir, as LaRee believes she is better able to accurately represent herself.

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Editor's note: The Preston Citizen newspaper recently interviewed Franklin County resident LaRee Westover on her new memoir, "Educating." As the title suggests, the book is in some ways Westover's answer to her daughter Tara's highly acclaimed and bestselling 2018 memoir, "Educated," which described the difficulties of growing up in an isolated, survivalist family where the children were largely kept away from the outside world.

LaRee Westover feels that she, like Robert Frost, has taken "the path less traveled," and it has made all the difference.

She has been a midwife. She has been a home schooling parent. She is a business woman, a wife, a mother, and grandmother. But at the heart of all she is and has been, she says, is a teacher. And it is to "all who have the heart of a teacher" that she dedicates her new book, "Educating."

"I have drawn from my collection of loose notes, poignant personal memories and pages of journal entries. ... I hope that the principles, coupled with the events and difficulties of my life, may inspire those who have chosen to live their lives differently from their neighbors," wrote LaRee in her book.

If she could only share one principle, it would be that "it is OK to choose differently, to be who you really are."

Although LaRee has had the book in her mind for years, two years ago she quietly began putting in words the attitudes and ideals that she employed to teach six students, three of whom went on to get Ph.D. degrees. They are her children. One of them, Tara Westover, gained international acclaim for writing her own book, "Educated," which portrayed her upbringing in the Westover family as a challenging experience.

Taking a break from a recent class she was teaching as part of her successful business, Butterfly Expressions, LaRee Westover explains that she hopes her new book will encourage parents faced with the new normal of online, at-home schooling that they can do more good than they know.

"The educational changes being implemented as a result of COVID-19 are changing perspectives about education. Parents everywhere are now carrying more of the responsibility of educating their children, and they are discovering how challenging - and how rewarding - it is to interact with your children in this way day in and day out. I see parents having the same desires for their children's educations that we had in our day," LaRee has said.

LaRee's first two children were attending public schools when her third child became physically sick from anxiety about kindergarten, and she decided she could provide a better atmosphere for him to learn at home.

Over time, she taught all of her children. She recognized that most of them came with ADHD, and one came with a variety of learning disabilities. But the kids never knew it. To their mother, her children's challenges weren't disabilities. They were merely differences in how individuals learn.

"I didn't learn like other people, but it was fine," she said her son with learning disabilities told her. "I don't think it ever occurred to him that he couldn't learn. He learned differently, but he had his own talents and abilities."

Since this child was not going to learn the way the average child did, LaRee found new ways to engage him: games with his older brothers.

"They would cut letters out of sandpaper so he could feel them," she said, noting she also discovered that letters in the color green were easier for him to remember.

That child was a tactile learner. Another child learned "upside down, hanging from a swing set."

The point, she said, is that everyone can learn, they just learn their own way. "ADHD is not a disease. It's genius intellect. They are the most brilliant kids on Earth. That's why they can't hold still," she said.

One son called her three days into a special program for giving mechanical engineers opportunities to apply the principles they'd excelled at on paper. "He was bored silly," because he'd already learned what they were trying to teach as a kid helping his father build hay sheds, build fences and other hands-on activities.

That way of learning, she said, was really no different than the way her father taught her. A postal worker who received his high school diploma when he was 90 years old, Richard Hunt inspired LaRee with tales of Roman history as he peeled apples with his daughter.

Today, LaRee's daughter Valaree Sharp teaches her children at home, as do others of her children.

"Homeschool is only hard with the first one because after that, you've got the older children to help to teach the others. And they learn it. When they have to teach it, they really learn it," Valaree said.

Learning is one thing, however, and testing is another. To help her children pass the tests required to gain college entrance, she said she took a year just to teach them how to pass tests.

Her main educational desire is that children learn how to think, she said.

Another portion of LaRee's book addresses her experiences as a midwife and "healer" through her herbal remedies. Included in the book is a chapter on the premature birth of one of her grandsons.

"He slipped into this world at one pound, 14 ounces," during one of the worst winter storms she remembers. Keeping him alive required getting him and his mother from home to the Franklin County Medical Center. LaRee delivered two children at a hospital herself, she said. It took time for her to feel confident enough to handle a delivery herself.

The prevailing attitude that has guided the path she has taken, she said, is the idea "I can do it, myself."

This isn't LaRee's first book. She's written four others about various aspects of applying herbs and essential oils for better health. Despite her excitement for having completed her memoir, LaRee said she does have concerns.

"It may make my daughter mad," she said. It doesn't fit the narrative found in "Educated."

Furthermore, since that book captured the attention of the world, LaRee and the rest of her family have been continually faced with the dim view many readers of the book hold for her and her husband's views and way of life.

For eight years in a row, Butterfly Express, which was founded by LaRee but is now owned by her husband, Val Westover, enjoyed 30% to 50% growth each year, but business fell off once "Educated" gathered a large audience.

LaRee has a completely different view of herself than how she is described in Tara Westover's "Educated."

"I want to tell the story of my life as I really lived it. I want my grandchildren to know who their grandmother is and was, and I want to be a force for good in their lives. Also, I feel a compelling desire to shine a light of accuracy on homeschooling, herbal medicine, and the living of a conservative and Christian way of life," LaRee writes on the Indiegogo website where her book is being pre-sold.

"I hope this modest memoir may bolster someone's resolve to achieve their own goals in spite of naysayers and roadblocks," she writes.

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Mother of "Educated" author tells her own story about life off grid in Idaho

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Editor's note: The Preston Citizen newspaper recently interviewed Franklin County resident LaRee Westover on her new memoir, "Educating." As the title suggests, the book is in some ways Westover's answer to her daughter Tara's highly acclaimed and bestselling 2018 memoir, "Educated," which described the difficulties of growing up in an isolated, survivalist family where the children were largely kept away from the outside world.

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In her painting, Frida Kahlo, an artist who taught herself to paint in recovery from a bus accident, reflects a period in her recovery when she was bedridden and had to endure a force-feeding diet. The woman in the bed is Kahlo herself, and the lack of control she has over her life at the time was represented with her arms restrained under the sheets. She has no power over what is being put into her body, similar to how Tara Westover had no control over her parent's choices during her childhood. These restraints persist in Tara's life as she ventures out on her own and finds herself unprepared for the world outside of Idaho due to her isolated upbringing. Kahlo paints the sun in the background of her piece to allude to the fact that the sun signifies human sacrifice in Aztec mythology. Just as Kahlo feels as though she is being sacrificed due to the accident she faced, Tara Westover's father sacrificed her education due to his personal beliefs.

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In her interview with Ellen, Tara discusses how her memoir highlights the difference between intention and effect; despite her parents having well-meaning intentions, the way they believed they were protecting their children turned out to be harming them. She also explains to Ellen that, as she grew older and attended college, she was drawn into mainstream society, while her parents became more radical. This difference in beliefs, according to Tara, made maintaining a relationship increasingly difficult.

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Author Tara Westover’s Incredible Story About Leaving Her Strict Survivalist Family

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Tara's story starts in her childhood home located at the base of Buck's Peak Mountain in Idaho. Due to her family's isolation from society, Tara's father had complete control over the lives of his children, as he didn't have to worry about intervention from the outside world. Gene, the name Tara gives her father in Educated, had grown up himself on the mountain and had developed hardline Mormon beliefs over the course of his lifetime. Not only did he insist that all injuries sustained by his children be treated by their midwife mother, but he also refused to send them to school.

Tara was born in the year 1968, a time when the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements alarmed Mormon leaders by representing the erosion of traditional values. To counter these movements, Mormons emphasized more strongly the importance of family life, thus becoming more conservative.

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Mary Oliver wrote "The Journey" to highlight the importance of taking one's life into their own hands. Over the course of the poem, she describes the challenges that go along with breaking free from the negative influences in our lives, explaining that "the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice... the whole house/ began to tremble/ and you felt the old tug/ at your ankles." Readers can relate this to Tara's journey away from the isolation of her childhood, as her parents didn't accept her desire to attend college. However, as the poem continues, readers can see that the hardships faced along the journey are not without reward. Oliver mentions near the end of her poem that "there was a new voice/ which you slowly/ recognized as your own."