Educated – Tara Westover (2018)

My book group chose Educated by Tara Westover for our August read. I wasn’t sure it was the kind of thing I was in the mood for. I needn’t have worried – it’s enormously compulsive and was a great book group choice. We met last Wednesday, we all found things that made us so angry, and there were sections some of the group found very uncomfortable to read. It definitely gave us quite a lot to talk about.

“There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.”

Tara Westover grew up in Idaho, in sight of stunning mountains known as the princess, told all government agencies were her enemies, that the end of days was coming and had to be prepared for. Hospitals and schools were all part of the conspiracy and the family kept away from them. Apart from church attendance the family lived quite apart from their neighbours. Her life was entirely different to that of most little girls born in mid-1980s America. Until she was nine years old, she didn’t even exist, her birth had never been registered later she was issued with a retrospective birth certificate.

“I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.”

Tara; the youngest of seven children was destined however, to prove herself to be phenomenally focused, determined and a real survivor. The landscape in which she grew up in, was one that it would prove difficult to extricate herself from.  

Their community was a Mormon community. However, Tara’s father had taken some of the tenets of their religion to another level. The family home was a little way out of the small local town, incorporating a scrapyard, from where her father made his living. The Westover family were nothing like the other Mormon families in the area, who lived pretty much like other American families. Tara and the three siblings closest to her in age were home schooled – though what Tara’s mother saw as education was somewhat limited. The children could read and do basic maths, and there was one science book in the house for them to learn from. At some level I think (my book group agreed) Tara’s mother must have sensed something of her daughter’s natural intelligence. When Tara was still quite young her mother appeared to have some concern for her daughter’s learning – however she never built on that concern, and Tara was allowed to grow up in appalling ignorance of the world and its history.

For years there was no TV or telephone in the house – later Tara’s father Gene, allowed them – he seemed to change his own rules as it suited him. Tara’s mother became an unqualified midwife (in the same way wise village women did in England during the middle ages) and soon began to mix her own home remedies for the frequent accidents that happened in the scrapyard. Tara’s older brothers were always limping home sporting one gruesome injury after another, their father never very concerned by the battle scars his children wore. Whatever the accident was, no matter how serious, doctors and hospitals were never consulted.

As Tara grew older, she was expected to work alongside her father and brothers in the scrapyard. Her father began to get more extreme in his views, her brother Shawn more and more violent, and Tara’s clothing and behaviour is scrutinised and commented upon, she becomes afraid of falling below the required standard. As Tara becomes a teenager, she is allowed to take part in some local dramatics, when it is discovered she can sing – here she makes her first friend. It is the first small change. Her brother’s violence is shocking, and hard to read about, and Tara survives it by excusing it to herself – she sees his girlfriends enduring the same treatment, and her parents doing and saying nothing.

When she is sixteen, Tara decided that she wanted to learn, and set out on the long, difficult journey that was her education. Having never finished or in fact started high school – she manages to win a place at BYU by passing ACT exams – though her challenges are only just beginning. Showing the most extraordinary determination Tara finally embarks on her education – one that will take her from BYU to Cambridge University and Harvard. During these years and in her visits home she begins to question her memories of home and the things that happened there – and whether she will ever really be able to maintain her relationship with her family.

“But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”

Educated is a fascinating memoir, not only in the depiction of the Westover family – but in the story of how Tara changes. From her first awkward beginnings; a teenager unused to the company of other girls, who knew nothing of world history, and who felt her own ignorance daily, still terrified of doctors – to the woman who would leave Cambridge with a PhD.