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I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley, and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring.

I had been raised in the mountains of Idaho by a father who distrusted many of the institutions that people take for granted - public education, doctors and hospitals, and the government.

My older brother bought textbooks and was able to teach himself enough to go to college. When I was 16, he returned and told me to do the same thing.

I taught myself algebra and a little grammar, and somehow I scraped a high enough score on the ACT to be admitted to Brigham Young University, even though I had no formal education.

My loyalty to my father had increased in proportion to the miles between us.

My family always spent the warm months bottling fruit for storage, which Dad said we'd need in the Days of Abomination.

I think for people who are inside these relationships that are really hard to leave, there is always a compelling reason to stay. It's not that they are wholly bad people.

Because I never attended elementary schools of any kind, I missed most of the books that were popular with other kids my age. There was an exception, however, which was 'Harry Potter.' My grandmother gave me the first book when I was about 13, and I read it, then read all the rest.

I didn't read much in high school, maybe because I didn't go to high school. Instead, I worked.

When I was 17, I went to Brigham Young University. That was the first time I had set foot in a classroom.

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

Psychologically, when you hear something a number of times, you start to believe it.

I think reading an audiobook is a real skill - for one thing, you have to be able to do impressions and voices, which I cannot do - and it's just not a skill I have.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

When you write, you are alone. It can be a bit of a shock later to discover that people have read what you've written!

For a long time, I didn't think I had the right to walk away from my family.

Forgiveness isn't just the absence of anger. I think it's also the presence of self-love, when you actually begin to value yourself.

I had access to books, and I could read... but that more foundational, basic historical awareness, I didn't have any of that.

I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.

We think about education as a stepping stone into a higher socio-economic class, into a better job. And it does do those things. But I don't think that's what it really is. I experienced it as getting access to different ideas and perspectives and using them to construct my own mind.

An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

My parents would say to me, 'You can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.' That was the whole ethos of my family.

I think a lot of people have grown up with the idea that they can't learn things themselves. They think they need an institution to provide them with knowledge and teach them how to do things. I couldn't disagree more.

You can miss someone every day and still be glad you don't have to see them.

I felt like I needed to come to terms with the decision I'd made to let go of my family. What do you do when you want to be loyal to your family but you feel that loyalty to them is in conflict somehow with loyalty to yourself?

I felt like we had stories about family loyalty; I didn't feel like we had stories about what to do when you felt that loyalty to your family was in conflict with loyalty to yourself.

The things about my childhood that I really loved the most, writing about those things was hard because I knew they would never happen again.

We'd had books in my house growing up, but we had never had anything like lectures. I had never written an essay for my mother. I had never taken an exam. Because I was working a lot as a kid, I just hadn't elected to read that much.

So, I was born and raised the youngest of seven children on this really beautiful mountain in Southern Idaho. But my dad had some radical beliefs. And because of those beliefs, we were isolated. So I was never allowed to go to school or to the doctor.

During my first semester of college, I raised my hand in a class and asked the professor to define a word I didn't know. The word was holocaust, and I had to ask because, until that moment, I had never heard of it.

I don't really feel like I belong anywhere.

Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.

I read a handful of memoirs to get a sense of what the genre meant. I needed to learn the fundamentals of the craft. I had never written a word of narrative. What is a tense shift, what is point of view? I didn't know any of it.

We think love is noble, and in some ways, it is. But in some ways, it isn't. Love is just love. And sometimes people do terrible things because of it.

I didn't know if I would ever reconcile with my family, and I needed to believe that I could forgive, regardless.

There was a lot of beauty in my childhoood.

It was a quality of my childhood that everything had these two sides. Even though things could be really beautiful and peaceful one moment, they could also be a bit chaotic or maybe terrifying in another.

I didn't even have a birth certificate until I was 9 years old, which meant that, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I just didn't exist.

I get up when I feel like getting up. That's the deal I've made with myself: I can stay in bed as long as my dog's bladder holds. The other half of that deal is that once the dog is walked, the very next thing I do is write. It's mechanical. It's programming, very nearly brainwashing.

I have books I like very much, but I don't think there are any books that everyone should read. I prefer a world in which some people read this, and others read that.

I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.

I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood.

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