My Bookish Thoughts: Educated by Tara Westover

I'm standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn. ~ Opening of Educated 

Educated by Tara Westover

Random House, 2018

Nonfiction (Memoir); 334 pgs

I have such admiration for Tara Westover and all that she had to overcome—and likely still is dealing with. Raised by survivalist parents who feared the government and were preparing for the end of the world as we know it, Tara’s education came through limited homeschooling. Most of what she learned growing up was through helping her mother, a midwife and healer, or working with her father in the junkyard. The family did not believe in hospitals or modern medicine, and so even with major injuries caused by fire, car accidents, or what have you, the rule was the family had to be treated at home by Tara’s mother.

Despite her father’s disdain for the established education system, Tara set her mind on attending college at the urging of one of her older brothers. She taught herself math and grammar, and studied hard so she could pass the ACT test. At seventeen, she stepped onto the Brigham Young University campus for the first time. It was a culture shock, and Tara struggled to fit in. Her classmates thought she was mocking the Holocaust when she said she had never heard of it. The truth was, she hadn’t. She knew slavery had existed, but not the reality of it. She had not heard of the Civil Rights Movement. Her eyes were suddenly opened wide to just what she did not know.

Tara struggled with her identity as one can expect. She came to see the world she was raised in, including her parents, in a very different light. She loved them fiercely, but began to see cracks in their thinking and way of life that she once had accepted as normal and right before. I appreciated that Tara does not gloss over what she has been through, both the bad and good. I liked that she is honest in her divided feelings about her family and the world that has opened up for her. I cannot imagine it was easy for her any step of the way, even now.

I never doubted Tara’s parents’ love for her, even if I didn’t always agree with the choices they made. I enjoyed reading about Tara’s experiences on stage and can definitely see the allure of the mountains where she was raised. I felt for Tara as she grew apart from her family and her strong desire to have that familial connection when it seemed impossible it could still exist.

It was painful to read some parts of the book, particularly about her brother, who, although it is never said, I wondered if he too was mentally ill like her father. I was scared to death for Tara, and, honestly, I am scared to death still for her brother’s family. I really hope that someone has stepped in to intervene. Domestic violence and child abuse is no joke, and I worry someone will end up dead.

Kudos to the author for using footnotes to document discrepancies in the memories of certain events. It’s hard not to read memoirs with a grain of salt given the two or three people who have outright falsified their stories, and so Westover including those added notes only adds to the validity of her story—and her efforts to get it as right as she could.

Although our experiences are completely different, I found I could relate to some of Tara’s struggles. I think many of us can. Whether it be struggling to fit in, living with a parent with a mental illness, reconciling our past with our present, or learning to accept and trust in oneself.

From a poor girl with little to no education to earning a doctorate at Cambridge University, a lot can be said for the strength and perseverance of the author. She is both intelligent and extremely resourceful. Tara was also very lucky given her circumstances that she had the support and guidance she did along the way, sometimes from surprising sources. People believed in her even when she did not believe in herself, and that played a key role in the direction her life took. Educated is an inspiring book.

Tara Westover is an American author. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her father's junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. After that first encounter with education, she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008 and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014.

Educated is her first book.

For more information about the author and her books, visit her website. You can also find her on Twitter.

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