Bio? Really? I quite literally wrote a book about this. (Yes, I very modestly wrote a book about myself.) Anyway, maybe you don’t want to read the book, so here’s the short version:

I was born in Idaho, raised by survivalist parents opposed to public education. For that reason, I never set foot in a classroom until I was seventeen. That’s how old I was when I left my father’s junkyard and enrolled in a university. I had no diploma, no formal training, so at first it didn’t go so well. I failed a lot. I was awkward. I wore the wrong clothes, said the wrong things.

Eventually, it got easier. The world began to open up. I started learning about all the things that, because I had been kept out of school, I had never heard of before: the holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement, Debussy and Degas, photosynthesis and tectonic motion. I got pretty into it. So into it, in fact, that a few years later I graduated magna cum laude from Brigham Young University and won a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge in England. I never did get my high school diploma, but in 2014, I left Cambridge with a PhD. I was “educated,” whatever that means.

I was also losing my family. They were unable to accept the person I had become, and I was unable to accept some of the old patterns that had defined my childhood. Violence, fundamentalism, threats. I loved my family, but I wasn’t sure if I belonged there, if I could fulfill their expectations of me. I wrote this book in large part to try to understand that tension—the tension between what I owed to my family and what I owed to myself. I don’t claim to have solved it. This story isn’t a solution. But then, most stories aren’t.

Anyway, if you read it, I hope it will be of some use to you. If not, well, there are plenty of other books!