“Educated: A Memoir” by Tara Westover (published 2018)

“Educated: A Memoir” by Tara Westover, is the harrowing account of one girl’s journey in rebuilding herself as an individual apart from the girl who was emotionally and physically abused during childhood and teenage years. It was Tara Westover’s biological family, who prided themselves on an extreme form self-sufficiency and self-reliance that claimed all government ties as work of the devil, who perpetrated this abuse.

Despite this, Tara’s early years were not without beauty. Growing up next to a massive mountain her family nicknamed “The Indian Princess” for its changing colors during the warmer seasons, rural Idaho was an almost sacred landscape to roam wild and free in, as well as a grand backdrop to contemplate existence itself:

“Of course I *did* exist. I had grown up preparing for the Days Of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World Of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected… I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over by the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle – the cycle of the day, the cycle of the season – circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.”

However, even as Tara describes her childhood home with an almost Eden/paradise-like quality, behind all of it was sheer violence. Her father, making money by hauling scrap metal from a junkyard, told his children that it was God’s plan that they help him also, even Tara, one of two girls. They used heavy construction machinery, they learned the difference between aluminum, iron, and steel, they learned what extensive manual labor does to the body and mind, and they learned how to duck when their father chucked huge pieces of metal over their heads without caring for their whereabouts – but even as they ducked, there was not a person free from severe injury. Third-degree burns, concussions, extreme roughhousing, gashes large enough to expose bone – all these were consistent occurrences within the Westover territory and household, and all these were treated homeopathically and from home, without a single certified doctor. And all these wounds lie next to the wound that take much, much longer to heal – those being of a psychological and emotional nature.

Without getting birth certificates for her children, Tara’s mother did not know when her daughter’s birthday was, and neither of her parents, at one point, had a clue how old she was, being a few years off at best. When asking her parents to go to school, which she had never attended, the response was something like – why go to school when you should be praying for a husband/looking to get married? To which Tara responded she was only in her mid-teens, while her parents believed she was already in her early twenties.

Shawn, an older brother of Tara’s, harassed her more explicitly, ripping her hair, dragging her on the floor, making his sister call herself a “whore” for bathing or putting on even the slightest bit of makeup. (More disturbing still is the fact that the Westover’s refuse to believe that Shawn ever abused her when she confessed to them what was happening right before their very eyes.) Meanwhile, Tara’s brother Tyler is hiding behind the basement stairwell reading the encyclopedia in secret, page by page, so as not to encourage the rage of his parents.

These are all just tiny bits of a deeply intricate web of stories laid out in a heart-breakingly poetic tone by Tara Westover. When she finally finds a way out of Buck’s Peak (imagine teaching yourself trigonometry every morning before going out the junkyard to haul scrap the entire day and being told by your father that *college is for idiots who didn’t get it the first time around*) and arrives at Brigham Young University, the story becomes disorienting because Tara herself is disoriented – the vast difference between her life at home and her new life away from it in such a short period of time can only be described as something like extreme culture shock.

“Educated” is a great example of how culture shock can actually be experienced in one’s own country of birth. “Educated” also brings to the forefront the discord and dissonance in American culture brought on by religious fervor along with religious beliefs (such as the varying degrees of Mormonism in one small geographical area), ideas concerning the government as protector or the government as an immoral and greedy system of control, socialism vs. pure ethics, rural vs. urban… educated vs. self-taught vs. intellectual labor and manual labor… the list goes on. Tara’s account compresses these dissonances down to one family. But that so many segments of American thought and ideology, and keep in mind this is not *meant* to be about race or gender outright, must live and clash and breathe and work and speak side by side cannot be expressed any more authentically than what Tara Westover has written down in her book. “Educated” does not just map out political territories, but she maps out a personal terrain of the psychology behind the madness of all of it – a madness that takes her all the way to England and back again.

The self-criticism Tara has is sharp, especially when it comes to her own writing. In her accounts of writing, she never fails to question her own authoritative voice – favoring someone else’s. But the first time she decides *not* to favor another voice *above* her own, she writes:

“To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came from not anger or rage, but from doubt: *I don’t know. I don’t know.* Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice may be as strong as theirs.”

Read this book and discover what it means to really travel – to travel not for adventure or escape or for pleasure or for work – but to travel for survival in the 21^st century. To travel to find yourself, to travel to keep yourself from disappearing. This kind of travel takes place right where you are, it takes place in the mind, it takes place over miles of land, it takes places from upstairs to downstairs, it takes place with writing, with words, with friendships and conversations, with closing doors and opening others. Read this book and meet Tara Westover, a person who’s honesty reaches far enough to say that the difference between her and others was not the academic ideas of class and status so dear to her, but reaches far *inside* of her to something fundamentally different – something that had “rotted on the inside, and the stench was too powerful, the core too rancid, to be covered up by mere dressings”. Maybe knowing about the rot inside makes the insistent decomposition of the notion of self create an understanding from what has died: an understanding of who you are by accepting what you are not. At least, that has been what “Educated”, this fascinating memoir, has taught me.