Educated: interesting, incredible, and inspiring
Title: Educated: A Memoir
Author: Tara Westover
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 334
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Who will like it? Someone who likes interesting books (that’s you!) and is open to reading non-fiction.
Tara Westover is such an incredible person. She was born into a family so different from many of ours — she experienced childhood with adamant religious and personal beliefs projected from her father, initially without things we think of as beyond commonplace — she didn’t have a birth certificate, school, or medicine, or the “government”. I was shocked when I learned that she was 17 when she first stepped foot inside a classroom, being born and raised in Idaho, and I was all the more inspired when her life completely transformed upon following her heart to pursue an understanding of the world.
Undeniably, Tara is insanely talented, and she has a curiosity and proclivity towards learning. But I’m more impressed by the way she weaves her words together and tells the strength in her story. Her childhood is controversial and can be seen in so many different lights. Her father sees the way he raised her as the right way — by protecting her, gifting her basic principles to govern her life, and genuinely believing what he taught her about conspiracy theories. On the other hand, mainstream society probably sees her childhood as outright abusive — physically, emotionally — and her father as delusional, certainly with a psychological disorder.
But how Tara writes is plain yet astounding. Instead of “betraying” her family, she shows that deep inside she loves her family in a difficult way. It is so easy to tamper with words and cross a line and begin to demonize her family, blaming her parents for all the difficult adjustments and illnesses and pain she faced in her life, and truth be told, society would sympathize with her stance without even blinking if that is how she decides to tell her story. Yet somehow, Tara writes about her life through the fair, clear eyes of a child. Whether she thinks fondly of certain moments in her childhood or despises other moments of agony, all those moments make up a part of her, ingrained inside of her. She spent her entire childhood living at Buck’s Peak and all of the fragments of her family, as fragmented as it was, coalesced into the picture which is her life.
In an unconventional way, it is also clear that her family loves each other, even though it is easy to dismiss or overlook their love. Tara’s father, Gene Westover, wanted Richard to have an education and sent him off to college, after seeing how well Tara was. He surprised Tara by offering to support her in her education when Tara phoned home about the financial stress she was facing. Tara’s mother, Faye Westover, may have shifted shapes and attitudes because she always needed someone’s backing up and never possessed authority, but Faye still silently protected Tara from her father’s bursts of outrage. Even Shawn, Tara’s brother who agonizingly abused her and many other women (although Tara never labelled it as “abuse” since the word seems to carry colossal weight and warrant immediate judgement), loved Tara at moments, teased Tara, taught her to horseback ride, and rebuked her father when she was ordered to go work the Shear, “a three-ton pair of scissors”. The love in the Westover family is blurry, but it is real, and Tara’s education shines through in the way she discusses her past, not directly blaming her family, but just clearly and accurately telling her own story.
Sometimes, I think it’s easy to forget the tangible value of an education. What is the inherent value of sitting in a lecture hall? An education brings us perspective to see the world, to understand how our lives are limited with respect to the rest of the world, and that there is so much perspective, emotion, knowledge, and discoveries to be in human society and the natural world. Education allows us to independently and thoughtfully evaluate our choices, instead of blindly following what is dealt to us, thereby unfolding new pathways to life, letting us weigh options fairly. An education also brings a sense of empathy and understanding of ethics that cannot be taught, but only be exposed to, because morality cannot be taught by memorizing the Golden Rule or reciting lines in The Republic. Ethics is accumulated through learning about actions, people, events, outcomes — even through a quick snapshot condensed to its finest in a lecture hall. An education is practical as it helps someone meet the basic requirements of job searching on the market, equipping people with basic skills, but it is also so much more than that, becaues an education also opens up the world, and so we have a choice in who we are.
Tara rightfully feels ambivalent towards her family, just the speaker does in the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke. I’ll insert it here.
My Papa’s Waltz
by Theodore Roethke
This little boy in the poem barely reaches the height of his father’s waist and his “right ear scrape[s] a buckle”, but waltzing with his father is full of excitement and thrill, all the romping and frolicking, ending with him “clinging to [his father’s] shirt”, not wanting to go to bed, yearning for more play, or we can interpret that action as him holding on for balance. Is this a nostalgic, fond memory or a distressing one?
