At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father's house. That night I called on her and she didn't answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. 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.
Educated isn't your average overcoming-a-miserable-childhood memoir: as a matter of fact, I don't think that Tara Westover was miserable as a child at all. Born into a fundamentalist Mormon family (Westover is careful to note that this book is not meant to be anti-Mormon), her mother was an unlicensed midwife and herbalist, and her father a contractor/scrapyard owner/Doomsday Prepper in a remote area of Idaho. Because her father Gene (Westover uses pseudonyms for most of her family) literally believed that the End was nigh, he committed his family to living a literal interpretation of the Mormon faith (which his children accepted as righteous) and he distrusted the government to such a degree that he wouldn't send his children to school, use doctors or pharmaceuticals, or even comply with seatbelt laws (despite more than one serious accident with the whole family aboard an unlicensed vehicle). As young Tara Westover spent her days in total freedom – roaming the fields and mountain around the family property, helping her mother prepare her herbs, rough-housing with her siblings – she didn't resent not going to school; she believed every word her father spoke as the revealed truth, and although the Ruby Ridge incident ratcheted up the family's paranoia for a while, hers sounds like a nice childhood.
But at about the same time that Westover hit puberty, one of her older brothers, Shawn (also a pseudonym) suffered a pair of brain injuries that transformed his (already violence-prone) personality: he began to bully and abuse his little sister, calling her a whore enough times that she began to believe it herself. With only infrequent contact with others her age – Westover was by now part of her father's work crew at the scrapyard, suffering small injuries herself as she witnessed others being burned and mangled and then poorly treated with her mother's homeopathy – she began to wonder what it would be like to live like one of those outsiders; what it would be like to get an education. Although her parents considered their kids to be “homeschooled”, other than having learned to read from the Bible, Westover knew very little of math or science; knew only what history her father shared from his understanding of the founding of America and the Mormon Church. Somehow, when Westover was sixteen, she was able to teach herself enough from an ACT test-prep book to be able to pass an entrance exam and be admitted to Brigham Young University. And somehow, she was able to find her way out from under her parents to move away to school. Once there, not only was she scandalised by her fellow Mormon classmates' interpretation of “modest dress”, but immediately, Westover was forced to recognise that she had been raised in ignorance of most of world history. She had never heard of the Civil Rights Movement, didn't know that Europe was a continent and not a country, had never heard of the Holocaust. When she went to the computer lab to learn what she could about the Holocaust, she had an epiphanal moment:
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.It took Westover a few semesters to train her brain to not only take in all this new information, but also to start making bigger connections; all while returning home to Idaho during breaks, working in the scrapyard and suffering through Shawn's abuses. She began to evaluate her own family in terms of the bigger picture, and while she continued to love and respect her parents, continued to attend church and think of herself as a good Mormon, Westover began to see cracks in the foundations of their beliefs. Meanwhile, back at school, when she caught the attention of one of her BYU professors, Westover was invited to spend a semester in England reading at Cambridge, and once there, she so impressed one of her supervisors that he recommended her for a full scholarship to come back and complete her Master's. (When it hit the newspapers that a student from BYU was getting this prestigious opportunity, Westover's father was incensed that his daughter hadn't credited “homeschooling” for her academic success.) She gets her Master's, continues to grow intellectually, but when she accepts a Fellowship to Harvard in order to start work on her PhD, Westover's parents decided that enough was enough: they informed her that they were coming to Boston, and once there, her father begged her to allow him to give her a special blessing from God that would expel whatever demon was possessing her. All she had to do was apologise for leaving their path and she would be accepted back into the fold of the family; an acceptance that she wanted so badly.
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.She declined the blessing and spiralled into depression. When Westover was eventually able to think clearly again (which took much time, counselling and Netflix bingewatching), she refocussed on her PhD dissertation and decided to research and write about four influential intellectual movements from the nineteenth century and how they dealt with “family obligation”. One of these intellectual movements was Mormonism, and Westover was finally able to put her family's indisputable “truths” into their historical context; treating Mormonism as no more, nor less, important than the thinking of Hume or Rousseau, Wollstonecraft or Mill. And it's this intellectual transformation that's the real heart of this book:
My idea of a historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of the past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even augmented. Now, as I passed through King's College, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny. Who writes history? I thought. I do.Educated isn't a takedown of Mormonism or any religious upbringing; it's about self-creation and fighting to discover one own's position in the long history of humanity. I've read enough overcoming-a-miserable-childhood memoirs to recognise the common theme: the author or musician or comedian or painter uses the pain of a difficult childhood in order to create their art. But Westover's story is a shade different: she uses her pain in order to create history; and that's a subtle difference that was worth exploring.
