Educated by Tara Westover

This book was a hard read for me in part due to some of the cringeworthy content. Once I was done with it, I was not sure how I felt about it. But as I processed it in the days after, it turned out to one of those books that left me with some valuable lessons on human emotions and memories.

Tara Westover’s memoir details the events of her childhood in the household of religious fundamentalists and survivalists. It is a triumphant account of how she breaks free from those circumstances and processes the enormity of the real world.

Her father did not trust the federal government and the services it provided. They lived isolated lives in a mountain. She spent her days working in her father’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother. Being cut off from the rest of the world, she was not privy to a lot of things that people in a regular society would take for granted. For instance, she had no birth certificate or had ever gotten a vaccine.

She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. She received a BA from Brigham Young University and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. This was just the beginning. She went on to pursue higher education eventually getting a PhD in history from Cambridge.

The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

At the crux of the story, however, is the author’s need for acceptance from her family even after her new life takes off. It was interesting to read her attempts to reconnect with her family and eventually coming to the conclusions that she did.

We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell. This is especially true in families.

Westover did point how different people might have different accounts of the same events from their past and how one’s perspective is influenced by their experiences. To that end, I must say that I found some of the events(or rather Westover’s interpretation of them) a bit implausible. I am not saying she did not go through the ordeals that she catalogs in the book and I hate victim blaming, but I cannot help but wonder about the degree of embellishment. For instance, the author’s mother treats what are fatal wounds with herbs and essential oils or the fact that the author with no formal education was able to get in to some prestigious universities.

‘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.’

Overall, it is an intriguing account of the author discovering her sense of self and agency. It is about her coming to terms with her present educated self while not completely abandoning her past(in form of her family). This book was on NY Times bestseller list for many months and Bill Gates called this it amazing and fascinating and I and not about to disagree with him.