Book title: Educated
ISBN: 9780399590528
Author: Tara Westover
Publisher: Penguin Random House, New York
“To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty, there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s”.
– Tara Westover, author of ‘Educated‘
THE extremity of Westover’s upbringing emerges gradually through her telling, which only makes the telling more alluring and harrowing.
The basics are these: Now in her early 30s, she was the youngest of seven in a survivalist family in the shadow of a mountain in a Mormon pocket of southeastern Idaho.
Her father, Gene, grew up on a farm at the base of the mountain, the son of a hot-tempered father, and moved up the slope with his wife, the product of a more genteel upbringing in the nearby small town.
Gene sustained his growing family by building barns and hay sheds and by scrapping metal in his junkyard; his wife, Faye, chipped in with her income from mixing up herbal remedies and from her reluctant work as an unlicensed midwife’s assistant and then midwife.
During his 20s, Gene’s edgy and not uncharismatic intensity morphed into politically charged paranoia, fuelled by what the reader is led to presume is a severe case of bipolar disorder.
Around the age of 30, he pulled his eldest children from school to protect them from the Illuminati, though they, at least, had the benefit of a birth certificate, an indulgence the youngest four would be denied.
In theory, the children were being home-schooled; in reality, there was virtually no academic instruction to speak of.
They learned to read from the Bible, the Book of Mormon and the speeches of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
The only science book in the house was for young children, full of glossy illustrations.
The bulk of their time was spent helping their parents at work.
Barely into her teens, Westover graduated from helping her mom mix remedies and birth babies to sorting scrap with her dad, who had the unnerving habit of inadvertently hitting her with pieces he’d tossed.
Getting hit with a steel cylinder square in the gut was the least of the risks in the Westover household.
The book is, among other things, a catalogue of job-site horrors: fingers lost, legs gashed, bodies horribly burned.
No pointy-headed bureaucrat could make a stronger case for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration than do the unregulated Westovers with their many calamities.
Making matters worse is Gene’s refusal to allow any of the injured and wounded (himself included) to seek medical attention beyond his wife’s tinctures – “God’s pharmacy” – a refusal that also greatly exacerbates the effects of two terrible car accidents.
“God and his angels are here, working right alongside us,” he told Westover.
“They won’t let you get hurt.”
When she gets tonsillitis, he tells her to stand outside with her mouth open so that the sun can work its magic.
She does, for a month.
As time goes on, the conflict between father and daughter gathers as inevitably as the lengthening fall shadows from Buck’s Peak above.
Gene’s fervour and paranoia are undiminished by the failure of the world to end at Y2K, despite his ample preparations.
Meanwhile, she is starting to test the boundaries of an upbringing more tightly constricted than she can even begin to imagine.
Her venture into a local dance class ends with her father condemning the group’s painfully modest performance outfits as whorish.
Encouraged by an older brother who started studying covertly and eventually left for college, Westover attempts to do likewise, reading deep into her father’s books on the 19th-century Mormon prophets.
“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand,” she wrote.
As if her father’s tyranny is not enough, she must contend also with sadistic physical attacks from a different brother, whose instability was worsened by a 12-foot headfirst plunge onto rebar in yet another Westover workplace accident.
Tara makes her first big step toward liberation by, remarkably, doing well enough on the ACT to gain admission to Brigham Young University.
(“It proves one thing at least,” her father said grudgingly. “Our home school is as good as any public education.”)
There, she is shocked by the profane habits of her classmates, like the roommate who wears pink plush pajamas with “Juicy” emblazoned on the rear, and in turn shocks her classmates with her ignorance, never more so than when she asks blithely in art history class what the Holocaust was.
(Other new discoveries for her: Napoleon, Martin Luther King Jr, the fact that Europe is not a country.)
Such excruciating moments do not keep professors from recognising her talent and voracious hunger to learn; soon enough, she’s off to a fellowship at Cambridge University, where a renowned professor – a Holocaust expert, no less – can’t help exclaiming when he meets her: “How marvellous. It’s as if I’ve stepped into Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’.”
Westover eventually makes it to Harvard for another fellowship and then back to Cambridge to pursue her Ph.D. in history.
Even then, she’s not yet fully sprung, so deeply rooted are the tangled familial claims of loyalty, guilt, shame and, yes, love.
It is only when the final, wrenching break from most of her family arrives that one realises just how courageous this testimonial really is.
These disclosures will take a toll.
But one is also left convinced that the costs are worth it.
By the end, Westover has somehow managed not only to capture her unsurpassably exceptional upbringing, but to make her current situation seem not so exceptional at all and resonant for many others including me.
She is but yet another young person who left home for an education, now views the family she left across an uncomprehending ideological canyon and isn’t going back.
