Educated by Tara Westover (2018) - Nonfiction

You'll be surprised but overjoyed that she survived long enough to write down her story

In her first book, Educated, Tara Westover, makes it clear that her memoir is not a critique of any religion in particular. Her family is Mormon, but not the friendly type that comes knocking at your door, but rather the type that prepares for the End Times by setting up hidden machine guns to keep away all the "gentile" heathens who are clamoring for survival. As probably 99.9% of Mormons would agree, the Westover form of Mormonism is not Mormonism at all.

What Tara's memoir is is her story of growing up in rural Idaho with a religious zealot father, an emotionally repressed mother, an abusive brother, and other family members of varying degrees of sanity. A slew of pejorative adjectives come to mind when thinking about most of the family: dangerous, deranged, psychotic, fanatical, etc. Her family's cycle of abuse, turning a blind eye, fanning ignorance, outright neglect, and taking sides is nothing new, but the drama is so raw and the writing so fluid that you'll be gnawing at the pages pleading with Tara to do the right thing. But you'll also need to remind yourself that "doing the right thing" is always easier from an onlooker's perspective. And it usually hurts a lot.

The story is also about how a quality education can transform your underlying worldview of everything and drastically change the trajectory of your life. The book's sleeve highlights a handful of Tara's achievements including being a fellow at Harvard (I don't even know what a "fellow" is but it sounds so purposely humble next to "Harvard" that is must be important). The academic accolades are not able to drown out the questions that Tara is forced to face: Can she retain a connection with her family even as she feels a great divide beginning between them? Should she even try? How can she reclaim a sense of dignity when she doesn't even know she has lost it? How can she feel a part of her whole new world when she' so bewildered by it? These sorts of questions continually poke and prod you. It becomes clear that education does not happen in a bubble; it imbues itself upon every aspect of your life.

Early in her education at BYU Tara attempts to keep her growing awareness of the world and self separate from her family life. She has returned home for vacation and her close friend, Charles, is over for dinner:

"He was conventional in all the ways and for all reasons my father despised conventionality: he talked about football and popular bands more than the End of Days; he loved everything about high school; he went to church, but like most Mormons, if he was ill, he was as likely to call a doctor as a Mormon priest. I couldn't reconcile his world with mine so I separated them" (p. 176).

This highlights her approach not only in how to handle Charles but the new "conventional" world opening before her. She discovers her separating strategy arduous for the fact that an education influences all aspects of your life. For Tara this is even more accentuated by the fact that she was poorly home schooled her entire life; never learning anything about the Holocaust, World War II, Martin Luther King Jr., or the Civil Rights Movement. This perpetuates her feelings of estrangement in her new world, but she can not find solace at home either as her brother Shawn has chosen a new slur for her: Nigger. "Shawn called me Nigger that entire summer: 'Nigger, run and fetch those C-clamps!' or 'It's time for lunch, Nigger!'" Tara sadly reflects on this time, "It has never given me a moment's pause" (p. 177). She was totally ignorant of the word's significance. Upon returning to BYU she takes a course in American History and writes one of the most poignant reflections on education, identity, and power that I've ever read:

"I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others-because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining that power always feels like the way forward" (p. 180).

Tara should drop the literary mic at this point, and for optimistic thinkers like me it's easy to assume she has it all figured out. But we're only on page 180 out of 329 and forget that Tara has been dragged through about 20 years of manipulation so pervasive that her struggle with reconciling her past and present sense of family, self, and the world has a long way to go. Tara's journey progresses and regresses in numerous encounters with professors, family, and some old friends. If there were one climax in this memoir it may be a conversation between Tara, her mother, and her father while at Harvard. They're essentially pleading her to renounce her education and return home. She recalls the struggle:

"While they plotted to reconvert me, I plotted how to let them. I was ready to yield, even if it meant exorcism. A miracle would be useful: if I could stage a convincing rebirth, I could dissociate from everything I'd said and done in the last year. I could take it all back-blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleaned vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have a family" (p. 300).

This shows that as life-giving an education can be, it does not bring you love, and at this juncture in her life that is all Tara yearns for. And the ultimate crux arises: With every fiber of our being pulsating do we sacrifice what we know is right in order to be accepted? The caveat for Tara is to rightfully question: Do they really accept me for me or only for what they want me to be? With nothing short of graceful style and poise does Tara give her answer.

If you're looking to tear up a bit while also wanting to tear out some pages with righteous rage then this book is for you. You'll be inspired to live out to your convictions and make the right choice; even if when it may hurt.

Highest Score - 5 Trophies

Writing: 🏆🏆🏆🏆

Readability: 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

Argument: 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

Overall: 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆