Educated

Educated by Tara Westover describes her completely off-grid upbringing in a Mormon survivalist sect, her path to college and an adulthood in academia, and then how these two experienced are resolved.

Growing up, Westover’s parents didn’t believe in schools or hospitals. At first, the children are homeschooled by their mother when they’re not doing chores or working at the family junkyards, but when it turns out that their mother is unequipped to teach so many ability levels, the children are largely left to their own devices. This cements the family belief that teachers are obstacles to learning, and that anyone can teach themselves anything.

Fainthearted readers take note: Westover bluntly describes head trauma, serious burns, teeth knocked loose, and other major injuries, and then describes how these were treated with herbal remedies at home. These homemade concoctions aren’t based in any traditional herbal properties, but on her mother’s system of feeling for special properties in the tinctures she mixes. There’s one telling scene in which a boyfriend gives Tara an aspirin, and she is surprised by her first experience of pain relief.

One of Tara’s older brothers, called Shawn in this memoir, although it’s pretty clearly a pseudonym, is a childhood friend who becomes a lifelong tormentor. These sections are painful to read, because you can see young Tara trying to see the good parts of her brother. Adult Westover tries to explain his violence and abuse towards the women in his life with a head injury or chronic pain from all the accidents he’s encountered. But even with an explanation, Shawn is physically and emotionally abusive to Tara, over and over, as well as violent to their sister and his girlfriends.

Another brother, Tyler, quietly announces that he’s studied on his own in order to attend Brigham Young. Westover’s parents don’t actually forbid him from attending, but there’s a divide in the family from then on. Tara follows his path by studying for and passing the ACT to apply at BYU. Westover’s struggles with her first educational experiences are eye-opening. Although raised nominally Mormon and attending BYU, she is upset by other students’ LDS practices. Westover is shocked when a roommate shops on a Sunday, while her roommates and classmates are also upset by her social skills and lack of hygiene.

It’s only when she’s been away from the mountain long enough to be aware of the norms around her (washing her hands after using the bathroom, for example, or reading a textbook to pass a class) that she begins to worry about fitting in. On a study abroad, she worries she’s in the wrong place.This part really hit home for me, because when I was a state-college student on my own study abroad at Cambridge, I often felt like a fraud around the real scholars, and I often felt like some of my classmates had a secret reading list that made them really educated.

I keep starting to call this a novel, because the story described is so far outside
Throughout the memoir, Westover notes that she’s recounted events to the best of her memory. This reminds readers that this wild story is a work of non-fiction, but also highlights the vast space between Westover and her family. She is clear that many of her relatives don’t believe her accounts.

At the end of the memoir, Westover is aware of the divide her family, between those who’ve earned degrees (two of her brothers are also PhDs), and those still living on the mountain and working at the family herbalism business. Westover confronts her own abuse and discovers that her sister, Audrey, has also been abused by Shawn, but she’s unable to stop it or even get acknowledgement from her parents. Many members of her family, including Audrey, turn on her for causing trouble and insist she’s remembering it all wrong. She’s led to an even more upsetting realization that her relatives who remain financially dependent on their parents are supporting, or at least complacent towards, the terror and violence within the family.