Isolation was the family's founding philosophy, not just its circumstance

Tara's father, Gene (a pseudonym Westover uses in the book), didn't just live remotely in the mountains near Clifton, Idaho — he built an entire worldview around distrust of government, doctors, and public schools, convinced the End of Days was coming and that institutions were instruments of control. The family stockpiled food, fuel, and guns, and Gene ran a junkyard where the children worked from a young age, often without safety equipment.

This wasn't simple poverty or neglect in the ordinary sense; it was a coherent ideology that made isolation feel like virtue and vigilance feel like love. Tara's birth was never registered with the state until she needed a passport at seventeen, a fact that made her, functionally, invisible to the systems most people take for granted.

Takeaway: the most durable forms of control don't feel like control from inside them — they feel like the only sane way to see the world.