Educated by Tara Westover

Genre: Memoir

Rating: 3 stars

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

Educated is so much more than just a coming-of-age memoir. It is the story of a young girl’s struggle to get away from her abusive family and her caged childhood, the story of a woman who finds herself through an education that she had always craved without knowing the importance of it, and the story of mental illness, familial bonds and the lies we tell ourselves.

Tara Westover, the author of the book, is the youngest of seven children in a Mormon fundamentalist family. Gene, her father, is a self-declared prophet who lives in the constant fear that the world is coming to an end and forces his family to share his paranoia. His wife, Faye, starts out as a reluctant mid-wife who emerges as an essential oils guru who brings their family under the spotlight in their little town in Idaho. Westover’s parents do not believe in public schools and modern medicine. Instead, they live in the belief that being a part of such institutions is a definite way of being sucked into the schemes of the Illuminati. The result is that Tara and her siblings have to make a conscious decision if they want to study beyond the few tattered books available to them in their homes.

Even before Westover begins to recount the abuse she faces at the hands of her elder brother Shawn, the stories from her childhood are grim. The constant struggle for money, her bipolar father’s refusal to create a safe working space for his children who are forced to work in a hazardous place like a junkyard and the family’s stubbornness when it comes to ignoring serious injuries all lead to difficult reading. Parts of the book got me thinking that nothing worse could happen to Westover, but then I would turn to the next chapter, and I was proved wrong. Some of the injuries in the book were so gruesome that it is truly a miracle (irony intended) that the family survived for her to tell the tale.

“Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”

Right at the beginning of the book Westover announces that in no way is her story about Mormonism. Though religion is a constant part of the story, through her father’s sermons, her brother’s definition of modesty and her own exploration of the principle of polygamy, not once does she attempt to explain or criticise the religion itself. Her story instead explores the idea of the American dream in terms of how opportunities, knowledge and dreams can be forbidden for someone while living in the centre of the country.

At 16, when Westover decides to finally rebel against her father and pursue her dream of getting into college, her eyes are opened to just how vast the world really is. Ideas that were fed to her through the prejudiced perspective of her father suddenly seem changed to her. Through reading, learning and experiencing, she realises things about herself and the limitations of the life her family led. She explores the ideas of feminism as she struggles to shake off the label of ‘whore’ that her brother has given her, she attempts to understand the concept of freedom and identity as she questions the lack of both in her own life, and she realises the extent of her own ignorance even as she makes her way from BYU to Cambridge and then to Harvard, working towards her PhD. Her transformation can be seen in the way that she goes from refusing to change herself to craving conformity and then lastly to accepting the fact that she stands out from the rest.

Through Educated, Westover also questions her own memories. She tries to make sense of the discrepancies in her recollection of events in the past and those of her family. The book also provides a sensitive portrayal of the self-doubt one faces when pitted against those one loves, the confusion that is inevitable when the place that one calls home is also the place where they were hurt the most, and she highlights the idea: of how is one supposed to treat their paranoia when their paranoia is what’s stopping them?

Educated is terrifying in places, as Westover’s brother hands her a bloody knife after she accuses him of abusing her, infuriating in others, as everyone around her goes back on their word and the tables are turned on her, and hopeful in places, as she works towards a better life by letting go of the toxic familial bonds and forming new ones with others around her. Most importantly, it left me shocked that this was a true story.

In the course of the book, without any proof of her existence, formal education, or financial means, Westover makes the journey from Buck’s Peak, Idaho, to Harvard. She exposes painful details of her life and looks at the lies she told herself in order to survive. But, somehow, I was left with the feeling that there are things about her life she hasn’t dealt with yet, and with the kind of life that she has led, she can't be blamed. Westover’s Educated is an extraordinary story of one woman’s transformation that needed to be told and, in my opinion, deserves all the praise that it has received since its release.

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”