Books |
Tara Westover: Educated
By
Published: May 27, 2019
Category:
Memoir
If you haven’t read “Educated,” I feel better — I’ve been thinking I’m about the last literate person in America to read it.
It was published in April 2018. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for 65 weeks. It was on everybody’s “best of 2018” lists, starting with Barack Obama. It was a finalist for every major award. And — maybe the ultimate — on the 10-selection book rack at my local Target, there it was.
We love survival stories, particularly when a plucky young woman, stranded in a terrible situation, Fights Her Way Out and Makes Something of Herself. There’s always a case worse than the worst case, but it’s hard to beat what Tara Westover was up against. Her father was a survivalist, certain that the government could show up any day to kill him. And he was a Mormon, which made him hostile to the idea of female agency. And he was crazy — a toxic narcissist, surely bi-polar or schizophrenic. His wife was under his thumb. Tara, the youngest of seven children, was under his boot.
The Westovers lived in Idaho, isolated by geography and choice. Off the grid? The mother was a midwife. The kids had no birth certificates., The kids were home schooled, which meant, as Westover writes: “Learning in our family was entirely self-directed. You could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done.” And there was work. Endless work, because her father ran a junkyard. Her father tells his kids: “God and his angels are here, working right alongside us. They won’t let you get hurt.” But they do, often, sometimes seriously. Her mother made “healing” creams; they passed for medicine. Tonsillitis? In the chill of an Idaho winter, her father tells Tara to stand outside with her mouth open so the sun can heal her. She does, for a month, and gets sicker.
And the violence. One of her brothers suffers a head injury and becomes as unhinged as the father. Any worldly expression incites him; his sister is “a whore.” He shoves her head into a toilet, chokes her, and, at one point, debates what would be cheaper: killing her or having her killed.
As they say in Internet promos, you won’t believe what happens next. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. For the audiobook, click here.]
Somehow Tara learns enough math to get a decent score on the ACT exam and win admission to Brigham Young University. (Her father’s ridiculous boast: “It proves one thing at least. Our home school is as good as any public education.”) Her lack of knowledge becomes immediately apparent in an art history class:
Then the projector showed a peculiar image, of a man in a faded hat and overcoat. Behind him loomed a concrete wall. He held a small paper near his face but he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at us. I opened the picture book I’d purchased for the class so I could take a closer look. Something was written under the image in italics but I couldn’t understand it. It had one of those black-hole words, right in the middle, devouring the rest. I’d seen other students ask questions, so I raised my hand.
The professor called on me, and I read the sentence aloud. When I came to the word, I paused. “I don’t know this word,” I said. “What does it mean?”
There was silence. Not a hush, not a muting of the noise, but utter, almost violent silence. No papers shuffled, no pencils scratched.
The professor’s lips tightened. “Thanks for that,” he said, then returned to his notes.
I scarcely moved for the rest of the lecture. I stared at my shoes, wondering what had happened, and why, whenever I looked up, there was always someone staring at me as if I was a freak. Of course I was a freak, and I knew it, but I didn’t understand how they knew it.
When the bell rang, Vanessa shoved her notebook into her pack. Then she paused and said, “You shouldn’t make fun of that. It’s not a joke.” She walked away before I could reply.
I stayed in my seat until everyone had gone, pretending the zipper on my coat was stuck so I could avoid looking anyone in the eye. Then I went straight to the computer lab to look up the word “Holocaust.”
I don’t know how long I sat there reading about it, but at some point I’d read enough. I leaned back and stared at the ceiling. I suppose I was in shock, but whether it was the shock of learning about something horrific, or the shock of learning about my own ignorance, I’m not sure. I do remember imagining for a moment, not the camps, not the pits or chambers of gas, but my mother’s face. A wave of emotion took me, a feeling so intense, so unfamiliar, I wasn’t sure what it was. It made me want to shout at her, at my own mother, and that frightened me.
I searched my memories. In some ways the word “Holocaust” wasn’t wholly unfamiliar. Perhaps Mother had taught me about it, when we were picking rosehips or tincturing hawthorn. I did seem to have a vague knowledge that Jews had been killed somewhere, long ago. But I’d thought it was a small conflict, like the Boston Massacre, which Dad talked about a lot, in which half a dozen people had been martyred by a tyrannical government. To have misunderstood it on this scale — five versus six million — seemed impossible.
I found Vanessa before the next lecture and apologized for the joke. I didn’t explain, because I couldn’t explain. I just said I was sorry and that I wouldn’t do it again. To keep that promise, I didn’t raise my hand for the rest of the semester.
There’s more like that:
“I’d heard about slavery, but I’d never heard of the civil rights movement. And then the professor starts telling a story about this woman who had been arrested for taking a seat on a bus. The only way that I could understand it I guess, I just assumed that she had stolen the seat — like ‘take a seat,’ or, to take the seat.
Against expectation and optimism, she wins a fellowship to Cambridge. Becomes a Visiting Fellow at Harvard. Gets a Ph.D in intellectual history at Trinity College, Cambridge. And writes this book.
Why the book?
“I wrote the book I wished I could have given to myself when I was losing my family…. I wanted a story about forgiveness that did not conflate forgiveness with reconciliation, or did not treat reconciliation as the highest form of forgiveness. In my life, I knew the two might always be separate. I didn’t know if I would ever reconcile with my family, and I needed to believe that I could forgive, regardless.”
The damage never ends — “Part of me will always believe that my father’s words ought to be my own” — but Tara Westover emerges sane. And smart. And eloquent:
“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. I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.”
Don’t be the last person you know to read this book.
BONUS VIDEO
