Interview: Tara Westover Likes to Read Herself to Sleep

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

I like to read before I go to sleep. My thinking is that reading will focus my mind, bring a hush over the chaos of the day so I can drift off. But from time to time a book takes hold in that peculiar way that a book can, and I end up reading through the night, until the last page. Then I’m up after that thinking about the ending. Books are both the best and worst thing for my sleep.

Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?

Many of my friendships have been nourished by books. One of my best friends grew up in a religious home, as I did, and has struggled to settle into a comfortable relationship with her spiritual inheritance. A few years ago, we two traveled through Mexico together, and as we moved from place to place we both read Elaine Pagels’s memoir “Why Religion?” The book is desperately sad and philosophically daring. It is a book about beliefs, and how beliefs can be meaningful and comforting and inspiring and also costly. The trip was wonderful, like a pilgrimage. We sat up late most nights, nursing margaritas and trading quotes and stories and a few tears. I am so grateful to that book, both for the wisdom in it and also for gifting me that friendship.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

I like to be surprised by the characters — the discovery that the angel is not so angelic, the devil not so depraved. Being surprised by people is one of the great pleasures and great pains of life.

How do you organize your books?

By genre! I want so badly to be one of these people whose books are arranged by color. They photograph so well! And I have this notion that it would be very pleasant to sit in a room of books ordered by shade and hue, like a wall of paint samples.

But it could never work. It would go against how I actually use my library. Every few days I wander up to my shelves with a hankering of one sort or another, thinking something like, Today I would like to read an essay, or Today perhaps a short story. But I have never once approached my shelves with the thought, Today I would like to read a book that is yellow.