It took me more than a week to finish reading this book. After reading a few chapters at first, I felt incredible. In a very developed country, there is a native mountain family. Domestic violence, female prejudice, male chauvinism and religious overtones pervade the whole family. The whole family seems to have love, but it is not. Because of his father's bipolar disorder, a family is in an "abnormal" situation day after day.

This book is divided into three parts. The first part tells the author's childhood memories. For various reasons, Tara's family experienced several major accidents: car accident, father's burn, explosion, and numerous minor incidents. At the same time, Tara's childhood was full of verbal humiliation, physical violence and mind control from her father and brother.

Tara is undoubtedly one of the lucky children in the family, because one of her brothers, Taylor, has had a lot of positive influence on her. Under this influence, Tara strives to enter the classroom. Taylor's black and white CD is like a candy in Tara's dark childhood.

But the act of entering the classroom will undoubtedly be regarded by his father as a betrayal of his family, a contempt for God and a running dog of the government, so Tara has taken a long road of self-condemnation.

It is such a Tara, who grew up in an extremely primitive family, has no education, and even has imperfect socialization, but has entered a world-class university. This reminds me of a question that has been debated in the history of psychology for hundreds of years: who decides the individual, heredity or parenting?

It seems that since the development of psychology, the meaning of birth and education (acquired) family has become a convention. How did Tara get out of that recycling factory? The theme of the second part of this book is "education".

Education not only gave Tara the common sense, history and humanistic knowledge of modern society. At the same time, it also gave her a perspective and perception of the world. I was deeply impressed by a passage in the book. When I first entered the university, I couldn't understand this pile of things in the process of studying art painting appreciation, because in her view, neither the "concentration camp" nor those difficult paintings had any connotation, and the way she passed the exam was just for memory. But later Tara got angry when she read Martin Luther King (because she understood her brother's abuse) and felt that she was talking to a great man when she read history. Slowly, Tara also gradually "woke up".

But this "sobriety" with Tara is not as beautiful as I thought. When I thought Tara could finally get rid of the pain of Origin and Decline and live a happy life, the fact was that the author was caught in an infinite entanglement, and she couldn't even tell the difference between love in Dazhou and her, and her in Cambridge. There are also two Taras in the book.

However, at the end of the book, the ghost disappeared. After reading this book, I actually don't understand a lot, so I also read other people's book reviews. The most common explanation is that Tara, as an experiencer, and Tara, as a narrator, overlap in the process of writing, and it is through this coincidence that the author finds his true self. In reality, Tara has not reached a settlement with her family, but she has come out of the past and reached a settlement with herself.

There is a sentence in Zhihu's first hot comment: This book is actually a self-treatment process after Tara's mental breakdown. What makes her heal is an ability endowed by education, a brand-new perspective on self, and a narrative self.