As far as the federal government in the state of Idaho is concerned I didn't exist.
I didn't have school records. I never been to school and I didn't have
hospital records because I had never been to a hospital. I'd never set foot in
hospital and yeah and I didn't have any birth certificate or anything like that.
And I know that probably seems really strange to you and to a lot of people
but to me it didn't didn't seem strange so it was just my life.
I was raised the youngest of seven children in the mountains of Idaho.
My dad was something of a charismatic radical, so he was opposed to a lot of
the things that we would just take for granted as a part of modern life.
So he was opposed to doctors and hospitals and the public education and most things
having to do with the government.
And the reason that he was opposed to these things
is because he believed that they had been corrupted in some way by the
Illuminati and this belief that he had would have a huge impact on my childhood.
I think I think it was pretty young the first time I realised my family was
different from other families, maybe even four or five.
But it was a tremendous source of pride for me because I thought well we're right and they're wrong and
the end is coming and we're gonna live through it and we're gonna have all this
food and we're gonna have fuel for our cars I'm more than everyone else's
they're not gonna make it. So I just felt a lot of pride about it I was never put
in school instead of going to school I spent a lot of my time working in my
dad's junkyard or stewing herbs for my mother who was a really talented Midwife and herbalist.
I also was never taken to the doctor no matter how seriously I was
hurt and like many of my siblings I didn't have a birth certificate so I got
my delayed certificate of birth when I was nine and by that time there was some
debate in my family about when it was that I'd actually been born. So I didn't
know my birthday. I still don't exactly know it this is a very different world
and a very different set of ideas went into it and that world makes sense to
itself. It maybe doesn't make sense outside of it but it makes sense to
itself and it very much made sense while I was inside of it.
When it stopped making sense really is when I started to leave and and then I
was in two worlds essentially. I was able to teach myself enough basic
and grammar to pass the college entrance exam which in the U.S. is the ACT so I
passed that and then I was able to get into a University and what followed really
was a period of kind of extreme transition with all of the strange
experiences and mishaps that you might imagine would happened to someone who
goes to university without ever having any formal education before that.
So just one example of that I once raised my hand in a class in a lecture and asked
what the Holocaust was because I had never heard of it which is not something
I recommend doing. And you know there were a lot of things I've never heard of
like the civil rights movement and I thought Europe was a country. I didn't
realise it was more than one country and things like that. So but you know
learning about all these things, the Holocaust the civil rights movement, all
these things made such an impression on me that I would study it for ten years
and then I would graduate from Cambridge with a the PhD.
On the one hand it was really wonderful, because I was getting access
to all these new perspectives and new ideas and great things are happening
but it was also kind of terrible. It's actually quite
terrible because this world that I was living in that I had thought I was
living in anyway it was kind of slowly being torn down and torn apart and I was
kind of realising that the world was a bit different than I thought it was.
That whole experience was a lot like having one foot in each world of two worlds I
very much felt like I was trying to live in two different planes almost because I
would have my life at the University. Where I had pretty normal friends who'd
gone to college and went to the doctor I went to high school and went to the
doctor and did these kinds of things and then I would go home and I would
try to to be the person I had been when I lived there and that was...
There was some question it wasn't absolutely clear whether this new person that I was
becoming from from about all the things I was learning could actually belong in
that house I used to belong in. It was hard on a lot of people in my family.
Well it was hard on my parents because they had to watch me make decisions that they
didn't agree with. That they thought were wrong. Like participating in public education.
And it was hard for me because I had to go back to this place and watch
them continuing to live in ways that I wasn't necessarily sure
that I thought were right. My junior year of college, my dad
got injured, really really seriously. He was in the junkyard and he was trying
to remove a fuel tank from a car. And he was standing next to the car when a
spark from the cutting torch he was holding made it into the gas tank and the car exploded.
And he was burned horribly and my family made the decision
not to treat that in a hospital but to treat it at home. And I was incredibly
difficult thing to watch. The physical pain the emotional pain and watching
them go through that and I was also going through that with them.
It was it was a kind of thing where part of me thought they were crazy.
That's how they were handling it and then a significant part of me
thought that that was absolutely the right thing. So there was a lot of, a lot
of years where there was just a lot of friction and that would really come to a
head when I was in Cambridge. And I noticed something something began to be
different and it's kind of strange because in a lot of ways it wasn't
different at all and the only thing that was different is how I felt about it.
And that thing was my older brother. I had an older brother named Sean, who was 10
years older than me and he and I had always been very close. Well through most
of my teenage years he was my best friend. Kind of the one person I thought
really understood me but he also could be really manipulative and even a bit cruel.
And he had, since I was young, he would kind of do all kinds of things really.
He would force me to do these little errands for him and if I didn't
do them then he would get kind of violent and he would twist my wrist
behind my back until it started to crack. And sometimes nothing would set him off
in particular and it wasn't even clear why he was angry but he would
get so angry he would grab me by my hair, and drag me down the hallway, and shove
my head in the toilet and all the whole time shouting at me that I was a whore.
And this has been going on since I was a kid nothing if nothing had changed this
was the exact same thing but what had changed wasn't his behavior but how I
felt about his behavior began to change quite a lot.
And in my family this was my brother and his problems was something of an open seat
everybody knew but we never talked about it. And suddenly I began to talk about it
and I began to demand that it change. And what I would eventually learn is that
for my family they couldn't change and I couldn't accept that it couldn't change
you know there was everything else I could kind of live with but this one thing that I couldn't.
And you know ultimately, for some members of my family, it would
be easier to lose me and lose that relationship then it would be to confirm
something really difficult.
They have read it and things responded about the way that I would have expected them to.
I mean in my family, talking about especially my brother's abuse,
was a very difficult thing and I think this will be difficult for the same reasons
For a long time when I was writing the book I wasn't sure whether
I was writing a story of my education, which had been unusual,
or if I was writing a story of my family and how I had lost my family.
If I had never left and if I had never gone to school I would never have seen
my brothers violence for what it was and I would never have demanded the change
that would ultimately lead to me losing large part of my family.
So it took me a long time to realise that it was really the education and if I hadn't had
the education I would have been the same person that I had been as a child and
that person was a lot more... Was just accustomed really to that that relationship
and what it was. So it eventually I did realise that they were basically the same story.
The story of my education is the story of my family.
Because the story of my education was about how I had become a different
person and that person struggled to fit into those same relationships
you