Tara Westover gets Educated

As a young girl growing up in a family living off the grid on an Idaho mountain, Tara Westover was convinced that all kinds of external forces were intent upon her destruction--the FBI, the Illuminati, public school teachers, doctors, people who shop on Sundays--but only after she left that world did she realize that the greatest threats to her sanity and survival arose from inside her family circle.

In Educated: A Memoir, Westover presents the gripping story of her harrowing childhood,  her eventual escape from her family's home, and her pursuit of education and an independent identity. The youngest of seven children, Westover realized at the tender age of 7 that her family was different from those of other children, who rode the big yellow bus to school while she stayed home to absorb whatever education she could pick up from parents too distracted to provide any consistent instruction. And that's not the only isolating factor:

Dad worries that the Government will force us to go [to school] but it can't, because it doesn't know about us. Four of my parents' seven children don't have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we've never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist.

Of course, I did exist. I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spend my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.

This tension between the need to remain invisible and the growing child's desire to assert her own identity lies at the heart of this compelling book. She absorbs conflicting lessons from her father, who develops his own personal version of Mormonism based on individual revelation, and from her mother, who sometimes helps her sneak around her father's strictures, although she and her mother generally pay a high price for such intransigence. 

From a young age, Westover is taught that she exists only to marry, have children, and  submit to the men in her life, starting with her father, whose word is law and whose will is rock; however, she also starts seeing signs that he might not be as infallible as he claims. For instance, her father pushes her mother into becoming an unlicensed midwife, even though he believes women should not work. "I suppose he thought it was all right for Mother to be paid for midwifing, because it undermined the Government," she writes. "Also, we needed the money."

While other children are going to school and learning to read and write, young Tara is put to work sorting scrap metals in her father's junkyard--a dangerous place that maims and injures nearly everyone in the family at various times. Her father believes that wearing gloves or other protective gear will slow down the work,  and he also tends to fling heavy iron cylinders or sharp chunks of corrugated aluminum around without any awareness that Tara is directly in their path. At one point she says to him, "Don't throw them here! I'm here!"

But Westover's father seems particularly unaware of the presence of those closest to them, constantly putting them into danger. When he brings home a massive steel-cutting device called the Shear, he sends one of his children after another to work with it even after they keep getting injured, and since the family does not believe in seeking medical care, the inevitable injuries get treated at home, where Westover's mother treats deep cuts and third-degree burns with homemade herbal salves and tinctures--and no pain-killers.

There are moments of transcendence--when she sings the lead in a community musical or spends hours exploring the beauties of the mountain--but too often these bright spots are followed by pain, poverty, harsh labor, and, eventually, physical and emotional abuse. Tara falls victim to an older brother's sadism, but when he shoves her to the floor and begins to strangle her, she can't even call out to her mother in the next room--and isn't quite sure that her mother would help. 

When the grown-up Tara eventually confronts the family about her brother's bullying, they refuse to believe her and instead circle the wagons to protect the reputation of the bully. Westover presents a vivid and emotionally wrenching picture of a dysfunctional family warped and twisted by the irrational will of a brutal control freak, which makes her eventual escape even more remarkable.

Education provides the only escape route, but it's not an easy road, and she finds herself woefully ill-equipped for college, both academically and socially. She doesn't recognize the word "Holocaust" and so looks it up online, which reveals to her the huge gaps in her hit-or-miss self-education. She doesn't know how to apply for a government grant or how to go to the dentist or how to get along with roommates who don't dress as modestly as she does, and she has been so brainwashed to distrust anyone from outside her immediate family that she cannot bring herself to ask for or accept help. And when she compares her childhood to that of others, she is consumed by shame and cannot begin to share her pain.

Later, while working on her PhD at Cambridge, Westover overcomes her shame enough to start telling stories about her bizarre childhood, and only then does she understand the source of her shame:

It wasn't that I hadn't studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn't a diplomat. It wasn't that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.

And so she finds herself alone, isolated from a family that nearly destroyed her and then refused to accept the part they played in her pain. In this passage you can hear the small girl calling to her careless father: "Don't throw that here! I'm here!"

She's here in living color in Educated, which opens up a world that feels simultaneously exotic and familiar. Her voice is so engaging that I didn't want the book to end, but I suspect we'll be hearing more from Tara Westover. It would take more than the FBI and the Illuminati and all her father's fears to silence a voice this strong.