Educated: By Tara Westover
A memoir
A story about the struggle of self-discovery.
From the cover:
“Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survival-ists in the mountains of ldaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head for the hills" bag. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged metal in her father's junkyard.
Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when an older brother became violent.
When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. There, she studied psychology, politics, philosophy, and history, learning for the first time about pivotal world events like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes of severing one's closest ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes, and the will to change it.”
Why should you read this book?
Tara shows us what it’s like to grow up in a home filled with paranoia and extreme beliefs about the world. For most of us, we take our education for granted. But for people like Tara, education is a luxury.
Tara was able to break free from her sheltered home. This isn’t the case for everyone. She experienced the seed of curiosity and longed to see the world as it truly was. But because of her father’s maladjusted beliefs, attaining an education didn’t seem possible. Knowledge was something she had to seek in secret.
Reading Tara’s story, we can also feel her internal struggle. Between her family, her outside relationships, and even herself, there’s an identity crisis in Tara. She feels pulled in two different directions. At home, she’s a child of faith and loyal to her family. But the other part of her, the growing woman, craves to see the world with a different set of eyes. She aches to escape the veil of ignorance.
This is a powerful evolution story, from uneducated to educated.
Excerpts from Educated:
Page 33:
Dad had always believed passionately in Mother's herbs, but that night felt different, like something inside him was shifting, a new creed taking hold. Herbalism, he said, was a spiritual doctrine that separated the wheat from the tares, the faithful from the faithless. Then he used a word I'd never heard before: Illuminati. It sounded exotic, powerful, whatever it was. Grandma, he said, was an unknowing agent of the Illuminati.
God couldn't abide faithlessness, Dad said. That's why the most hateful sinners were those who wouldn't make up their minds, who used herbs and medication both, who came to Mother on Wednesday and saw their doctor on Friday-or, as Dad put it,"Who worship at the altar of God one day and offer a sacrifice to Satan the next." These people were like the ancient Israelites because they'd been given a true religion but hankered after false idols.
"Doctors and pills," Dad said, nearly shouting. That's their god, and they whore after it."
Mother was staring at her food. At the word "whore"" she stood, threw Dad an angry look, then walked into her room and slammed the door. Mother didn't always agree with Dad. When Dad wasn't around, I’d heard her say things that he--or at least this new incarnation of him--would have called sacrilege, things like, “Herbs are supplements. For something serious, you should go to a doctor:"
Dad took no notice of Mother's empty chair. "Those doctors aren't trying to save you." he told Grandma. "They're trying to kill you."
When I think of that dinner, the scene comes back to me clearly. I'm sitting at the table. Dad is talking, his voice urgent. Grandma sits across from me, chewing her asparagus again and again in her crooked jaw, the way a goat might, sipping from her ice water, giving no indication that she’s heard a word Dad has said, except for the occasional vexed glare she throws the clock when it tells her it's still too early for bed. "You're a know participant in the plans of Satan," Dad says.
Page 120
"Have you thought about leaving?" Tyler asked.
"And go where?"
"School," he said.
I brightened. "I’m going to enroll in high school in September,” I said. "Dad won't like it, but I'm gonna go." I thought Tyler would be pleased; instead, he grimaced.
"You’ve said that before."
"I’m going to."
"Maybe," Tyler said. "But as long as you live under Dad's roof, it'shard to go when he asks you not to, easy to delay just one more year, until there aren't any years left. If you start as a sophomore, can you even graduate?"
We both knew I couldn't.
"It's time to go, Tara," Tyler said. "The longer you stay, the less likely you will ever leave."
"You think I need to leave?"
Tyler didn't blink, didn't hesitate. "I think this is the worst possible place for you.” He'd spoken softly, but it felt as though he'd shouted the words.
“Where could I go?"
"Go where I went," Tyler said. "Go to college."
I snorted.
"BYU takes homeschoolers," he said.
"Is that what we are?"" I said. "Homeschoolers?" I tried to remember the last time l'd read a textbook.
“The admissions board won't know anything except what we tell them" Tyler said, "If we say you were homeschooled, they'll believe it.”
"I won't get in."
“You will,” he said. "Just pass the ACT. One lousy test."
Tyler stood to go, “There's a world out there, Tara," he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view your ear."
Page 209
Tara goes to BYU and while sitting in her Psychology 101 class she learns about “bipolar disorder.”
“The professor read the symptoms aloud from the overhead screen: depression, mania, paranoia, euphoria, delusions of grandeur and persecution. I listened with a desperate interest.
This is my father, I wrote in my notes. He’s describing Dad.”
Another student asks the professor about the role of mental disorders and famous conflicts like the standoffs in Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
Tara didn’t understand the references. She was from Idaho but didn’t know what the student was talking about. When she looked it up she realized it was the same story her father was always referring to. But his version of the story was different from the one she grew up hearing.
From her father’s perspective, the government was coming for their family. They came for those who resisted its brainwashing. And those who didn’t put their kids into school.
But while researching, Tara learned the conflict with Randy Weaver began when he sold two sawed-off shotguns to undercover agents he met at an Aryan Nations gathering.
“I read this sentence more than once, many times in fact. Then I understood: white supremacy was at the heart of this story, not homeschool. The government, it seemed, had never been in the habit of murdering people for not submitting their children to a public education. This seemed so obvious to me now, it was difficult to understand why I had ever believed anything else.”
“For one bitter moment, I thought Dad had lied. Then I remembered the fear on his face, the heavy rattling of his breath, and I felt certain that he'd really believed we were in danger. I reached for some explanation and strange words came to mind, words I'd learned only minutes before: paranoia, mania, delusions of grandeur and persecution. And finally the story made sense-the one on the page, and the one that had lived in me through childhood. Dad must have read about Ruby Ridge or seen it on the news, and somehow as it passed through his feverish brain, it had ceased to be a story about someone else and had become a story about him. If the Government was after Randy Weaver, surely it must also be after Gene Westover, who'd been holding the front line in the war with the illuminati for years. No longer content to read about the brave deeds of others, he had forged himself a helmet and mounted a nag.”
About the Author
Tara Westover was born in Idaho in 1986. She received her BA from Brigham Young University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned a Master’s of Philosophy 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.