Tara Westover on the human cost of leaving home

Born into a survivalist Mormon family, author Tara Westover escaped her tough and often brutal childhood through education

Tara Westover: ‘My feelings about the past aren’t frozen. They change. Sometimes I’m angry, sometimes I remember my family more fondly’ Pic: Fergal Phillips

‘Memoir is a stressful thing. If it were a novel, it would be different. It would be so much less fraught.”

In the lobby of the Fitzwilliam Hotel in Dublin, Tara Westover is explaining apologetically to her publicist why she can’t honestly say that she’s happy at the moment. The publicist has come in at the very tail-end of our interview, just when I’ve asked Westover, as a final question, to rate her ...