I hadn’t wanted to read this book. Sure, I’d marked it want-to-read, but I’d secretly been hoping I could avoid actually doing so. No such luck: a friend pressed her copy into my hands. I swallowed hard as I thanked her.

It was oh so much more infuriating than I’d expected. I did not like the feelings it evoked in me, of fury and helplessness. Things don’t have to be that way!, I kept wanting to shout into the book. But that’s the thing about ignorance: you just don’t know any better; and that’s the thing about an American subculture that worships stupidity: you rarely get the chance to learn.

Tara Westover was incredibly fortunate: hyperintelligent, talented, and somehow presented with improbable opportunities at just the right times. She escaped—although she never really will, not entirely, that sort of trauma forever shapes a mind. For every Tara, though, there are a hundred equally intelligent young people whose future will be cut short by accident, pregnancy, or just plain poverty. And for each of those there are another hundred feral others who are not bright nor talented nor promising; unthinking brutes who will continue perpetuating the cycles of ignorance cruelty and violence.

What have I gained now from reading it? What can I do, how can I help? I am now haunted by those questions, to which I fear I know the answer.