Educated

Tara Westover grew up on a mountain in Idaho. When she was born, she did not get a birth certificate. She is not sure of her actual birthday. As a child she never set foot in a classroom. Her father was a zealot who distrusted the government and hoarded food and guns, waiting for the end of days (he seemed disappointed that nothing happened with Y2K). She was regularly physically abused by an older brother. Yet she persevered and earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge. Educated is her story.

The book covers almost her entire life (she's now 32) and starts with her memories of Buck's Peak. Her father owned a scrapyard and built structures, with each of the seven children doing their part. Westover recalls that he wasn't much for safety, and remembers vividly being pushed toward giant shears that would have cut in her in half. One brother's leg caught on fire, another fell from a cherry-picker and incurred brain damage.

Living on the mountain was incredibly isolating. She knew almost nothing of the outside world. As a teenager she took part in some plays and was astonished by girls wearing sleeveless dresses--her father would have called them "whores." "I evolved a new understanding of the word “whore,” one that was less about actions and more about essence. It was not that I had done something wrong so much as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being."

An older brother, Tyler, managed to escape the mountain and go to college. He encouraged her to take the ACT test and go to BYU, even though she had no high school diploma. She took the test and passed. In her first few years there, she soaked up a lot of information. In one of her first classes she raised her hand to ask for the definition of a word she didn't know. It was "holocaust."

The remainder of the book is the struggle Westover had about furthering her education, going to England and becoming a historian--and her pull back to her roots. Her father's indoctrination lingers with her, and though her mother will express support, she always backs down. The mother is a very interesting person, as she is a mid-wife and later achieves great success in manufacturing and selling essential oils. Westover's parents do not believe in modern medicine, and indeed, her mother is able to heal the brother with a burnt leg and later the father, who nearly dies from an explosion.

My reaction to this section is to slap her and say, "Move on!" But she keeps thinking she can get her parents on board. When she finally accuses her brother of abuse, her parents don't believe her, and the brother threatens to kill her. The family splits in twain: "My family was splitting down the middle—the three who had left the mountain, and the four who had stayed. The three with doctorates, and the four without high school diplomas. A chasm had appeared, and was growing."

Westover writes that she had a difficult time being in her new world. She always felt like a fraud, even though a professor told her she had written the best essay he'd ever read. When her father says she has been touched by Satan, and then refuses a blessing from him, it's finally the end, and she has not spoken to him since. Her mother will not see her if her father is now welcome.

What I liked about Educated is that it is a clear-eyed memoir. Westover even notes that some memories may not be accurate (I know I can't remember everything that happened in my childhood). At times the craziness approaches comedy, such as when her father insists on driving through the night in a snow storm and crashes in Utah (without auto insurance). What makes his amazing is that this happened to the family in the exact same way a few years earlier.

The book occasionally drags, and feels like things are repeated, and there's a sense of "we know, we know, get on with it," but the honest emotion feels real. It's easy for me, who grew up in a secular household, to say she should have left the mountain much sooner, but I've never faced being estranged from my family. She deals with it in various ways, including watching television all day for weeks when she should be studying. That sounds familiar.