Tara Westover

am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.

Dad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates.

We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse.* We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist.

believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.

but Buck’s Peak was the most finely crafted.

Dad said the nomadic Indians had watched for her appearance as a sign of spring, a signal the mountain was thawing, winter was over, and it was time to come home.

My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened.

There’s a family not far from here,” Dad said. “They’re freedom fighters. They wouldn’t let the Government brainwash their kids in them public schools, so the Feds came after them.” Dad exhaled, long and slow. “

g about it was, “Next time, it could be us.”

g about it was, “Next time, it could be us.”