Educated by Tara Westover

There’s only one word I can think of when I finished reading this memoir: empowering.  

Coming from a girl, born into an extremely Mormon family in Idaho.  From a girl who had never stepped into a classroom until she was 17 years old, who had never been to a doctor, who lived with an abusive father and brother until she broke away to Brigham Young University, who didn’t even know her own date of birth.  Educated is a memoir about a woman who was torn between two selves.  The first of which wanted to remain loyal to her family, father, and her religion, and the second of which hindered her from doing so when she found out how blinded she had become as a result of this attachment.    

Westover writes passionately, and the beautiful thing about this memoir, is that all her feelings and memories are spilled out so vividly onto the pages it felt as if I were in her shoes, there with her, 20 years ago.  Westover writes a unique narration about her life, something most people wouldn’t relate to today, but thoughtfully weaves in pieces about family, about school, about relationships, about struggles with finances, about getting governmental support, and about rebelling making her seemingly too-unique-to-be-true memoir relatable to all in some way or form.  

For me, perhaps the most heart-wrenching moment in the book was during the time Westover was working towards her doctorate degree in history at Cambridge.  It was during this time that she and her sister had planned to tell her parents about their older brother, Shawn, abusing them when they were kids and suggesting he receive assistance before he abuses his wife.  Westover and her sister planned on telled their parents, but then her sister recklessly throws her under the bus and tells the family that Tara is crazy to think Shawn was abusive.  From then on, Tara’s relationship with her parents and all of her family becomes divisive and in a way, she is unspokenly disowned.  She tries to pull back into the family, to explain what happened, but her father has told everyone (extended family included) of Tara’s acclaimed mental instability.  She is even rejected by her own mother, who only recently regretted not playing her role as a mother.  

Westover is confused by her own thoughts.  Perhaps everyone in her family is correct in casting her aside as she studies across the Atlantic.  She works through memories, and thoughts, trying to find some thread to prove to herself that everything she has said about Shawn is true, and to prove to herself that she isn’t crazy as everyone now believes her to be.   It is in this moment when her third brother, who inspired her to go to college and is a doctor himself, connects with her and confirms the abuse from Shawn and Westover finds her linkage to sanity. Then her youngest brother, Richard, who was at the time working on a PhD in chemistry calls and confirms the statement and they becomes Tara’s allies in a family with seven children divided simply by who had a doctorates degree and who didn’t have a high school diploma. 

Tara Westover’s story is indubitably unique, but she writes in a heart-wrenching touching manner that makes every moment of it come to life beautifully.  Earlier, I wrote that the word I would use to describe my feelings after reading Educated was empowering.  Empowering, because here was a girl who came from nothing, who was given nothing, and who wasn’t allowed to achieve anything besides her predestined life on a farm, who took what little education, opportunity, resources, money she had been given, and made a better life out of it.  As a reader, I felt every success, failure, and emotion Westover went through as described in the memoir and while it was a bit of a slow start, the lessons I’ve read about and the way the book made me reflect upon my own life when I finished it, made it well worth the read.