The Places Where the Recession Never Ended

Tara Westover was raised by survivalist parents in the mountains of rural Idaho, and didn’t go to school. “Dad said public school was a ploy by the Government to lead children away from God,” she writes in her best-selling 2018 memoir, Educated. Still, she taught herself enough to attend college at Brigham Young University, and later earned a doctorate from Cambridge University. Today, she lives in New York City.

Westover recently spoke with Jeffrey Goldberg about cultural separation and mutual misunderstanding in America.

This interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You told me once that there is an “experience gap” in our national life—that we no longer share some underlying common experience as Americans.

Tara Westover: Yes, and the experience gap is fast becoming an empathy gap.

Goldberg: Do people in Idaho and people in New York City have more in common than they think? Or are we really becoming two countries?

We have a shared history and shared interests as Americans, that’s true, but