EDUCATED

EDUCATED

By Tara Westover

“… we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant.”

One of the most engrossing books I’ve ever read, Educated is the memoir of a woman raised in the mountains of Idaho with her siblings as a survivalist family. Her parents, deeply fundamentalist, don’t believe in doctors or modern medicine, outside schooling, or anything hinting at government intervention or control. They stockpile weapons and food for the time they may be forced to defend their way of life.

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies” – (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)

Never even having a birth certificate until she was nine years old – in fact never really knowing exactly when her birthday is – Tara Westover grew up working in her father’s scrapyard and helping her midwife mother gather and combine herbs for homeopathic treatments. She and her siblings were raised in fear and disdain of things “ungodly” or “whorish.” Members of the family suffer several traumatic injuries over the years, almost always forced to heal “naturally” at home, but the most traumatic of all may be the damage that they suffered to their own self-esteem, their own subverted will, and their own ability to think for themselves. Tara’s memories and understanding of events were constantly disputed and challenged, including the facts of one brother’s repeatedly dangerous abuse to her and other family members.

“Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”

Tara, although having suffered years of self-doubt and manipulation by her mentally ill father, her weak mother and abusive brother, and with virtually no education at all, manages to find herself at Brigham Young University, and from there she continues on to a Master’s degree and PHD from Cambridge before she is thirty years old. Although these achievements speak volumes about her inner strength, she still must deal with her own guilt for breaking from her family’s traditions and beliefs, and for saving herself.

“I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her”

This book was so well-written and absorbing that I couldn’t put it down. The horrors of her growing up years and she agony and self-questioning she still faced even after “escaping,” tore at my heart. She finally learns that her family wouldn’t change, even though she had.

A wonderful book.

Many thanks to NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Reviewed February 2018