Well, Tara, I loved your book.
It’s an amazing story.
And even though you'd had almost no formal
schooling,
you managed to get into BYU.
You have to learn algebra.
How did that come together?
I had no idea what education was.
I had never set foot in a classroom before.
But I really loved to sing,
and I became obsessed with this idea of going
to college
so that I could learn how to sing.
And algebra became a thing I had to do in
order to do that thing.
For me it took me to Brigham Young University,
and then I discovered history there
and that took me to Cambridge,
and then at Cambridge I discovered language,
and then I wrote a book.
And, you know, it goes from one thing to the
other.
And if you look at your family,
you and your two brothers who chose to go
out and go to college,
have done very, very well.
And there definitely is a rural versus urban
element in it.
Three of you that got very educated and others
that kept the same values.
Do you see this polarization as a problem?
I do feel like this division is a problem,
but I think probably you've hit on the most
disturbing part of it,
which is that the fault lines are increasingly
along educational lines.
So, people with the degree think one thing
and people without think another.
And then there's quite a lot of hostility
between the two groups.
People who used to disagree about things
suddenly now think the other side is somehow
in bad faith,
and they don't even recognize the other side
as particularly human.
And I find that really disturbing.
I find it disturbing that education has become
a part of it.
We say that education is a universal right
and everyone should have it,
but in practice it isn't really.
Certain people get access to a lot
and other people don't get access to very
much.
No, it's true,
I think education is really just a process
of self-discovery,
of developing a sense of yourself and what
you think.
But the more that we self-segregate,
and schools become reflections of people's
homogeneity,
then I think schools themselves become instruments
of division.
I think of education as this great mechanism
of connecting and equalizing,
and it can be a little bit frightening
when it becomes an instrument of that division.
You know, one unfortunate trend seems to be
that the highly educated, politically thinking
one set of thoughts
and the rest of the country are thinking other
thoughts,
and they don't even communicate very well.
It’s like two Americas.
And people have no idea what the other side,
how they live, what they think,
what their lives are like.
It's just completely divided.
And so, what I really want to do is tell stories.
I kind of have to believe
that if we had more ways
that we can understand and communicate with
each other,
that I believe that that would do a lot
to help us communicate and work on what I
think
is the central problem with our democracy
right now.
Which is that the two sides
no longer feel like they're even part of the
same country.
I kind of want to make the Idaho’s and the
Ohio’s and the Alabama’s
a little bit more accessible to the places
like New York,
to the places where that way of life
is so foreign and almost unimaginable.
And the book's done fantastically.
It's really resonated with people.
Yeah, no one's more surprised than me.
