Educated by Tara Westover

In the pursuit of a non-fiction but narrative structured book best suited for a winding down after a long day, I was recommended Educated, by Tara Westover. Initially Daniel and I planned to read it together. I made the effort to download it, read a few snippets on a flight across coasts, but today on vacation found some time to finish it in its entirety. What I thought would be a “quick page through some chapters” became a 4-hour binge on the corner of a king-sized bed in a Barcelona hotel. It was that good.

High-Level Summary:

The memoir begins with Tara’s very candid description of life in rural Idaho. She candidly describes her childhood – what would be considered abuse in any circumstance, from the lack of proper schooling to physical and emotional abuse brought on by her survivalist, bi-polar Mormon father. Her brother, Tyler, is the first in their family to go to college, without any formal high school training, and several years her senior, recommends Tara to also pursue a formal college education. In between going to illicit midwife deliveries with her mother, scrapping metal at the dump with her father, and suffering physical abuse from her brother Shawn, Tara manages to teach herself algebra, geometry, trigonometry, science, so well that she is able to take the ACT and score a 27, the required score to attend BYU.

Her family is unsupportive throughout – they believe “college is for gentiles” and a formal brainwashing scheme set up by the government, but Tara leaves. She’s 17 years old, has never spent time with anyone outside her immediate family, and has never received a formal education. She inevitably struggles to assimilate throughout college.

She does not handle this well at first, choosing to revert back to what was comfortable and what she once knew. When she comes home for the summer, she’s back in the junkyard sorting steel with her father. When she returns back to school she finds her first love, Charles, but is unable to even hold his hand. She is able to escape the limitations of her upbringing and her family with Charles, but when she brings him home, all of the underlying damage and toxic relationships she had buried unravels. They break up. She struggles with Algebra in school. And in this tug and pull of balancing who she is, who she was, and where she’s headed, Tara begins to craft her own path forward.

She finds mentors along the way, a local bishop who sponsors her emotionally and financially. He encourages her to apply for scholarship, of which she sends back the rest she does not use. She later applies for and receives the Gate Scholarship, attends Cambridge for her Masters and eventually, Ph.D. Tara’s tenacity despite financial, intellectual, and physical tribulations belittled any of my then-dramatic college roadblocks (i.e. taking a econ class outside of my comfort zone, missing breaks to vacation), and highlights the force and capability of perseverance and grit.

Perhaps the most poignant point of the memoir is how it ends – Tara confronting her family about the abuse she’s experienced and being ostracized by her father, mother, and sister. They ask her to recant her accusations against Shawn, what she feels is unjustly rewriting history and allowing those close to him – his wife and children – to be subject to the same suffering. But Tara realizes that she cannot save anyone and despite the difficulty of separating herself from those most dear to her, she breaks free.

Quotes:

“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”

“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

“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 power always feels like the way forward.”

“In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.”

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.”

“I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place, that word transported me. Every time he said it—“Hey Nigger, raise the boom” or “Fetch me a level, Nigger”—I returned to the university, to that auditorium, where I had watched human history unfold and wondered at my place in it. The stories of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were called to my mind every time Shawn shouted, “Nigger, move to the next row.” I saw their faces superimposed on every purlin Shawn welded into place that summer, so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.
I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will ever think of him that way. But something had shifted nonetheless. 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 power always feels like the way forward.”