Book Of The Month: Educated
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Educated is a fascinating read on so many different levels. It is a nonfiction memoir written by a young woman who was raised in an extremely conservative and oppressively authoritative household in rural Idaho.
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Educated
Originally Published: 2018
Pages: 352
Available on: Kindle, Audiobook, Paperback
GET YOUR COPY HERE
““My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.””
There are several remarkable things, right off the bat, about protagonist and author Tara Westover: She did not have a birth certificate until she was nine years old. Her grandparents once tried to persuade her to run away from her parents and move with them to Arizona, and she was raised strictly Mormon, with seven siblings. She endured psychological and physical abuse at the hands of an older, manipulative brother for years when growing up. Even though she wore conservative ankle-long skirts, negative influences in her life led her to think of herself as a “whore.”
Westover did not receive an education in a classroom setting until she was 17 years old, and that decision cost her her parent’s support; instead of schooling, she worked in her father’s dangerous scrapyard. As she grew into her own in college, her parents became firmly convinced that she had been overcome by a demon that must be expelled.
Whoa! Right? She had a very unique array of struggles that most people do not.
Growing up in a very restrictive household where her father’s word remained doctrine, Tara’s mind was shaped and sheltered by his values of faith, extreme modesty, paranoia of modernity and the rest of society, and a woman’s place in the household. While her parents loved their children, there was an element of carelessness for their safety and a determined mindset to keep their children sheltered, close, wary of the world’s sinfulness, and very obedient to Mormon enlightenment.
““It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.””
One of her older brothers repeatedly tortured Tara, physically and emotionally, right under the nose of their oblivious father and under the knowledge of their helpless mother. She was called the worst sort of degrading names and, as more and more abuse rained down on her, young Tara numbed her sensitivities and was manipulated to believe herself worthless, immoral, and undeserving. Even when authoring the novel, Tara admits how warped her memories are and how it is difficult to recall true events.
Tara was never permitted the freedom of her own mind and that was a hard-fought internal battle. As her education grew and her consciousness developed, she struggled to overcome the mold that her background had strapped her into. Once she moved out of her childhood home for good, she lost the support of her family but found…herself, instead.
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
Over the course of the story, spanning about fifteen years of her life, Tara slowly discovers that she has a voice of her own. It is fascinating and painful to witness her process of reclaiming what is naturally and rightfully hers, choosing to listen to herself and trusting what came within, instead of the external forces of her background and family that fought to manipulate her thought process and memory. How brave is it to back away from a structure on which all her support and life had been built upon for the first twenty years of life?
Readers can’t help but admire Westover’s frankness and transparency in describing the struggles she underwent. More than merely completing a formal education, Tara discovered just how much of a scholar she truly was. She graduated magna cum laude from Brigham Young University, won a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, earned a PhD in history from Trinity College in Cambridge, England, and is now a senior research fellow at Harvard.
It was when she was finally in Trinity College that she came to terms with the abuse and restrictive measures that she had been raised on. This impressive scholar had not been able to shake the haunting feeling that she had no right to be on campus, that she did not belong in the real world of free thinking and education. She felt like a fraud, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, fool’s gold. When would they realize she didn’t belong here, she wondered? She struggled with depression and anxiety, going home annually to visit her family in Idaho, both dreading and wanting their love.
A #1 New York Times Bestseller published in 2018, Educated is a story of struggle and success, of fighting against everything you’ve ever known to pave your own path, of slipping and falling, of letting yourself down and choosing to let others down because their idea of the future is not yours. Even those who love you most may not know what is best for you.
““An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.” ”
Educated is a herald of formal education, highlighting the importance of social, historical, and cultural awareness in order to understand who the human race is today. Westover maintains how she was brought up in ignorance, and that ignorance fostered shame, anger, resentment, isolation from her peers and the rest of society. She finally came to terms with the idea of self-creation and self-mastery, of freedom of the mind and of herself to be exactly who she wanted to be, free of external restrictions. Educated supports that old adage, “The truth will set you free.”
““First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.” ”
Westover’s definition of identity is based off an individual’s abilities, potential, dreams, and accomplishments; it allows for the possibility for change and growth, and also mistakes and finding out what you are not capable of. More than that, Westover asserts that identity is something self-conducted and self-established. You decide who you are. Not your family, not society.
Tara Westover currently resides in New York City, and was only 31 years young at the time of Educated’s publication in 2018. To get to know the author, all you have to do is read this book! Also, we encourage you to check out her website. On her simple but intriguing website, her straightforwardness and humility speaks volumes. She gave a college commencement address at Northeastern University that is delightful and endearing, and the website also lists her favorite literary works. Any bookworms should check it out!
Readers would enjoy this book if you enjoyed two of our previous books of the month, Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Brunt and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. These female-authored novels are set from a young female’s perspective, each a bildungsroman and in the case of The Glass Castle, memoirs that follow the real-life process of a young girl’s struggle to find her own path, away from her family’s.
This novel is so worth a read. Educated is in itself an education! You learn much about the trauma of domestic abuse and how it impacts a victim’s life for years and years, about Mormon culture, and the value of formal education. What education you personally received and took for granted will suddenly look very much look like a privilege!
We hope you enjoy reading this selection and learning about this unique woman’s life!
We leave you with another great quote from Educated:
““The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.””