As much as we're interested in people from Idaho, we're only interested in them to try to understand why they vote differently than we think they should. We have a tendency to see each other entirely through the political lens. Mostly, I think what's missing right now is good stories about people living different lives. That will be good, because it won't be about me, I really hope. That's kind of what's fun about writing, every project can be a little bit different. Maybe I'll write personal essays or journalistic essays or a novel, I don't really know what the format will be in the future. What does that mean?Īnything I write about will have to be a little bit different. I learned things, and those things that I learned changed me. Maybe there's a whole lot of people who have to struggle with that question. Who your family thinks you are and who they want you to be. I wonder if there are people in general where you grow up one way, and the world looks one way when you're a child, and as you grow up, you have to hold in balance that tension between who you were and who you're trying to be. That had a big impact on the relationship I had with my family, it was really defining in terms of the choices I would make and how I would resolve that tension. The fact that I was able to gain access and different points-of-view and study to learn things was what changed me as a person. The education side of it, for me, I think of being closely related. I think that's the point of stories, that we read what other people did and that we can identify that, and that we use that to work out what we think about our own decisions that we made. I think stories are part of how people work out how they feel about their own lives. A lot of people, maybe they don't have family situations that are quite as dramatic as mine, but a lot of people are trying to answer that basic question about what are the obligations they have to their families, and what do they owe themselves, and what do they do when those two things are in conflict or in tension? How do they solve that? A lot of people are dealing with some version of that, even if it's not my version. What I think of as the two big themes of the book are family and education.

Educated by Tara Westover