Educated by Tara Westover

Educated by Tara Westover received a ton of positive attention when it was published in 2018. This memoir of a young woman growing up with her survivalist parents in rural Idaho won a slew of awards and was recommended by several bookish celebrities, including Oprah, Bill Gates, and Michelle Obama. Naturally, I was interested in reading it, but was a little worried that it might not live up to all the hype it enjoyed. In any case, it was the perfect inclusion for my True Books Challenge, so onto my list it went. I decided to tackle it this month and find out if it was really as great as seemingly everyone was saying.

Westover begins her memoir with a description of her childhood home on a mountain in Idaho. She lived with her parents and six older siblings in a ramshackle house with few modern conveniences. Her parents were a mix of several different things - Mormon fundamentalists, survivalists, right wing extremists, and, in the case of her father especially, mentally ill, the combination of which made for a difficult and often abusive childhood. They did not believe in public education or modern medicine, so Tara never attended school growing up or went to a doctor. Instead, she spent her days working in her father's junkyard, an extremely dangerous job that continually maimed her and her siblings. When injuries occurred, her mother would use alternative medicine and faith healing to treat them. The family's distrust of the outside world was so great that most of the children, including Tara, were born at home and did not have birth certificates. 

As Tara gets older, she becomes interested in escaping the dangerous junkyard and limited opportunities that life on the mountain provided. She still loved her family, but she yearned for a different life. With the help of a friend, she taught herself enough math to pass the ACT and applied to BYU, claiming to have been homeschooled. She ends up getting accepted there, and leaves home, very much against the wishes of her father. From this point on, the memoir shifts from describing her insulated childhood to her exploration of the wider world.

Her first years at college are very trying, as she quickly discovers that she has never heard of many basic things most people learn about growing up in mainstream society. In a particularly embarrassing moment, she raises her hand and asks what the Holocaust was during a lecture. She works hard to educate herself  as she goes along and ends up earning top marks. Through various relationships she builds with professors and scholarship opportunities she takes advantage of, she ends up all the way across the ocean in England, where she eventually earns a Ph.D. from Cambridge. Throughout all of this, she works to maintain her relationship with her family, but as she is moving further towards the mainstream, they continually move even further away from it. Soon, she must make some difficult decisions in order to protect herself and maintain her new independence.

This book absolutely lived up to the hype. I was pulled in from page one and raced through this novel in just a few days. Westover's story is both absolutely fascinating and very difficult to read. She endures incredible emotional and physical abuse, and watching her overcome it is satisfying and inspiring. I can't imagine how much strength and effort it must have taken her to force herself away from the only home she had ever known, alone and against her family's wishes, to pursue a better life. No matter how difficult and wrong your home life is, walking away from it all is still really scary. Westover's struggle to do that is incredible and very compelling. It was almost frustrating, watching her persistently try to insert herself back into a family that was dangerous for her, but I can understand where she was coming from. Family relationships are difficult bonds to break for most people.

Westover's writing style is both beautiful and very easy to read. She uses a lot of nice imagery to convey her experiences, a technique which seems almost impossible when you consider her lack of education. The pace of the memoir is generally good, with only a few sections (mostly towards the end) dragging a bit. On the whole, this was an excellent reading experience and an almost impossible story. It had that same type of compelling "can't look away" factor that Tiger King had. It's unbelievable that people actually live like this and totally fascinating to read about it.  

I obviously really enjoyed my experience reading Educated, but there were a few weak spots. As I mentioned previously, some sections dragged or were repetitive. Also, I felt like there were some times where information I would have liked to know more about were glossed over or skipped entirely. There was also more than one moment in the books where Westover admits that her memory is hazy or differs from how her family remembers the same events. I do not think that she was dishonest with any of her recollections, but I do think that the memoir didn't flow quite as well as it could have in a few instances. I can hardly blame her for this though, as her younger years were so traumatic that it's hardly surprising that details have slipped away or become distorted in her mind.

Overall, Educated was an excellent read and I would highly recommend it. The story was inspiring and interesting and, for me, it did live up to all the glowing reviews it received. It was a disturbing little window into a world I knew nothing about and I know that Westover's words will stick with me for a while. When I finished reading this, I immediately texted my mom and got her to pick it up, which is not something I do often, especially for a nonfiction book. It definitely made an impact on me and was an excellent addition to my True Books Challenge.

Challenge Tally

True Books 2020: 8/14


Total Books Read in 2020: 38