"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.”
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days. Her father is a Mormon survivalist, and although I know little about Mormonism, I know enough to gather that he has a rather radical interpretation of the religion. Tara was not issued a birth certificate until she was nine years old. She had no medical records, because her father doesn't believe in modern medicine. She received no education until the age of 17, and her parents made little effort to educate her at home -- her time was better spent working for her father in his junkyard, or helping her mother, a midwife, concoct herbalist remedies. Needless to say, Tara did not experience a conventional upbringing, and it was this intriguing premise that influenced me to read her memoir, Educated. Given its critical acclaim, I knew this book would be interesting, but I was not expecting it to be one of the most engrossing books I have ever read.
Educated is more than just a memoir; it is a deeply introspective and self-exploratory piece of writing, very reminiscent of When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi in that regard. Its other similarity to Kalanithi’s memoir is the fact that it is extremely well-written. I expected Westover’s prose to be rather simplistic, getting the job done but lacking in flair or style, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Westover has a natural talent for writing, and her prose is beautiful. Especially considering that the only books she had access to growing up were the various texts of Joseph Smith, her eloquence and vocabulary are particularly impressive. She has a knack for metaphor and descriptive language, but she never overdoes it; not once did I wish that she would just cut to the chase. She balances perfectly between visceral detail and straightforward, concise storytelling, and it is this quality that made her memoir mimic a novel. The pacing of Educated is so disciplined, and the conditions of Westover’s childhood so extreme, that I was often left wondering how much of what I was reading was true. This is a common query raised about the book – how much has Westover sensationalised her upbringing? – but I saw it less as Westover taking liberties with the truth and more exercising her phenomenal writing ability to bring her story to life as vividly as possible, a task at which she most certainly succeeded.
One of my favourite quotes from Educated appears in the final pages: “I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.” Westover is currently estranged from her parents and three of her six siblings. She did not leave her home in Buck’s Peak, Idaho with this outcome in mind; she simply wished to attend college so she could learn how to sing, but at Brigham Young University, Westover was introduced to a part of history she had never known existed. One of her most revealing anecdotes is from her first ever Western art class, in which she had to ask the professor to define the word ‘Holocaust’ as she had never heard it before. She learned that the version of history her father had taught her was edited to suit his fundamentalist agenda, and she began to question whether or not her father’s divinity was really what he claimed. She has gone on to receive an MPhil and a PhD in intellectual history from Cambridge and Harvard, but she no longer has a relationship with most of her family – the chasm between urban and rural, educated and uneducated, became too wide for Tara and her parents to reconcile their differences, and she has not spoken to her father in many years. It took Westover a long time to make peace with this separation. She has learned that her family’s religious conduct is a far cry from the actual doctrine of Mormonism, and that the isolation of her childhood resulted in her often lending her voice “to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalise others”. Yet they are still her family; even though her empathy for their ignorance is met by continual rejection, her heart still belongs to Buck’s Peak. This is not simply the memoir about a woman’s unconventional upbringing; this is a memoir about the complications of family loyalty, and Westover’s decision to leave home and strike out on her own tested this loyalty to the most excruciating degree.
Another of my favourite quotes from the book is this: “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.” To me, Educated is the memoir of a woman going through an identity crisis. Her childhood was so isolated, and her upbringing so controlled, that she never had a chance to discover her own voice or develop her own understanding of the world. Her selfhood was defined for her by others, constructed of the truths and values given to her by her father; in her own words, Westover “believed then -- and part of [her] will always believe -- that [her] father's words ought to be [her] own”. Her journey from Buck’s Peak to Cambridge was Westover’s attempt to reclaim her own voice. I’d like to pull directly from the text now, because Westover said it so perfectly that it seems pointless to rephrase it:
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.
Westover has expressed in multiple interviews that education is not just a process of learning; it is “a process of self-discovery, of developing a sense of yourself [and] the way you think”. Her education took her far from the world she knew, not just geographically but philosophically, ethically, and historically too. She lost a great deal along the way, and rather fell to pieces for a while in the process (as one does when their family threatens to cut them off unless one allows an exorcism to be performed upon oneself), but she gained a great deal, too: she gained an autonomous voice.
Westover is not the first person to navigate this kind of emotional turmoil, but she has certainly written the most moving memoir about it. Educated, and its extraordinary young author, defied all of my expectations. I thought Westover would be illiterate, but she was not. I thought she would renounce her family, but she did not. Her memoir is a powerful and exquisitely rendered story that has left me with so much to think and write about, and although I have started to resent it a little bit because this review fought against me so aggressively, I will absolutely be recommending Educated to every person I meet. It is an absolute wonder to behold.
WORKS CITED
- Carey, A. (2018, February 24). Educated by Tara Westover review: An extraordinary Mormon upbringing recounted with evocative lyricism. Retrieved March 3, 2019, from https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/educated-by-tara-westover-review-an-extraordinary-mormon-upbringing-recounted-with-evocative-lyricism-1.3393833.
- Dean, M. (2018, February 14). Educated by Tara Westover review – escape from a Mormon fundamentalist family. Retrieved March 3, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/educated-tara-westover-mormon-family-review.
- Gates, B. (2018, December 3). Educated is even better than you've heard. Retrieved March 3, 2019, from https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Educated.
- Schwartz, A. (2018, June 14). The New Yorker Recommends: Tara Westover's Tender Memoir, "Educated". Retrieved March 3, 2019, from https://www.newyorker.com/recommends/read/educated-by-tara-westover.
