The Latest Episode of Oprah's SuperSoul Sunday Explores How to Define Love
Education is one of the most important factors in life.
But for author Tara Westover, it wasn't just about going to school and getting a degree. Education was, quite literally, an escape from her isolationist Mormon family. Rather than playing at recess or doing homework after school, Westover spent her childhood preparing for the end of the world, an unorthodox upbringing outlined in her debut novel Educated in 2018.
And recently, Westover sat down with Oprah for a special episode of SuperSoul Sunday to discuss the unexpected lessons her life has taught her about love. The interview, which airs on Sunday, May 5, at 11 a.m. on OWN, will be available on “Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations” podcast on Monday, May 6 and was filmed aboard the Holland America and O, The Oprah Magazine Girls’ Getaway cruise in January 2019.
The New York Times best-selling memoir details Westover's experiences growing up in the rural town of Clifton, Idaho (population 259). In Educated, readers learn that Westover didn't get a birth certificate until she was nine years old (and to this day, she's still uncertain of her actual birthday). Westover and her six older siblings worked in her father's junkyard, and they didn't go to school or hospitals because her dad didn't believe in public education and was suspicious of doctors. The older Westover got, the more she suffered abuse and violence at the hands of her brother "Shawn," a pseudonym used in Educated.
But then she decided education would be her way out, teaching herself enough about math and grammar to get accepted into Brigham Young University. When Westover first stepped foot in a classroom, she was 17 years old. And her hunger for knowledge didn't stop upon graduating in 2008. Despite her unconventional upbringing, she would go on to earn her PhD in intellectual history and political thought from Cambridge University in 2009, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2010.
Now estranged from her family and living in England, Westover sat down with Oprah for SuperSoul to discuss the coming-of-age-story that won a Goodreads Choice Award in 2018 and was praised by former president Barack Obama and billionaire Bill Gates.
"This book Educated is liberating for so many people," Oprah during her sit-down with Westover. "I know that one of the reasons why people are responding to it in a big way is because you’ve shown so much of your own courage, vulnerability, and strength to find your voice and to find your own way out."
Oprah added: "For me, it’s in three parts: living in the shadow of life on that mountain, coming out of the shadows, and then being able to reject the shadow and the darkness of the past in order to embrace the light."
Westover agreed, clarifying that in addition to rejecting the past, she was striving to "hold on to the good memories" and the "positive feelings" about the people in her life, while "reconciling with the more negative things."
Oprah opened their conversation by reading an excerpt from Education, then proceeded to ask the author what her childhood was like. Considering the fact that Westover had little to no interaction with anyone outside of her family-and had no historical context or basis for the Holocaust, life after slavery, or the civil rights movement-her response was surprisingly optimistic.
"There were beautiful elements of it," Westover said. "My mother was an herbalist and a midwife, and, when I was a child, that had, like, a magical quality. She could heal in a way that, to me, seemed like a magician. There was a way that I experienced my childhood as a child, and then you grow up. You have to decide what you think of as an adult, and there’s also the complication of wrestling with the people around you that you love."
During their candid chat, Westover also opened up about the transformative power of education.
"Thinking about the world from another person’s point of view is incredibly difficult," she said. "The thing we don’t ever acknowledge is that respecting other people is the first step to respecting yourself. If you can’t have empathy for a life that’s different from yours, you’re not going to be able to look at our own life from different points of view, which is what you’re going to need to do to make any change."
The interview continued down Westover's dark past, with the O of O asking her about the abuse inflicted upon her as a child by her older brother. Oprah, who is no stranger to abuse and sexual assault herself, was shocked to learn that Westover didn't consider what was being done to her as violent.
"He was a complicated person," Westover said. "He could be really kind, and he could be really insightful. I think a lot of times that manifests itself as violence, insulting words, or emotional abuse."
The version Westover played out in her head was that of seeing an alcoholic father or husband take his frustrations out on an embattled housewife. But her brother breaking her wrist and pushing her head into a toilet didn't resemble what she saw on television, so she rejected the idea of it being anything other than "playful," until he attacked her in a parking lot. After the incident, which she goes into more detail in her memoir, Westover told Oprah about the journal entry she wrote when she was 16. On the blank pages she remembered writing: It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.
"I think all abuse is a form of assault on the mind, and if someone is going to have an abusive relationship with you, they really have to invade your reality and distort it," Westover said. "They have to change how you see yourself and what you think happened, and my Brother had that over me," adding that the violence in her household was normalized to an extent.
But the healing part of the frank discussion came when Oprah asked Westover how she was finally able to stand up to her brother and fundamentalist parents.
"Sometimes our ideas about love are really simplistic," she said. "We think of it as something that fixes everything, or, if the love is real, then you definitely have to stay in the relationship. The only way to really respect love is to respect its limits, and respect that it doesn’t give you the power to change other people. That’s why you can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them. It’s not necessarily a question of whether you love them, it’s a question of whether they belong in your life."
And with that, Westover forged a path for herself that would lead her to a classroom and empowering herself enough to form a life away from the mountains of Clifton, Idaho, and most importantly, away from a household riddled with domestic abuse.
"You can miss a person every day and still be glad they’re no longer in your life," Westover added. "It took me a really long time to figure out that love is just love. We do love a real disservice when we make it about control and power. That’s not what it is. You love people and you give them that for free. And then you decide whether that’s something you want to have in your life."
Of course, Oprah couldn't end their one-on-one without asking Westover to define education.
"Education is discovery-it's your mind growing, taking responsibility, letting go, and holding tight. It’s all of those things. It’s having enough knowledge and empathy for yourself and for other people to make decisions so that you can do well with the things you need to do. It’s that ability to have many different perspectives and different points of view."
An all new episode of SuperSoul Sunday will air on Sunday, May 5 at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on OWN, and will stream on Oprah’s Facebook. The interview will also be available on Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations podcast beginning Monday, May 6.
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