Educated by Tara Westover is a raw memoir of the author’s experiences growing up as the seventh child of a religous survivalist family in Idaho. Her father Val (pseudonym Gene in the book) apparently began to suffer symptoms of mental illness in his mid-twenties and in parallel increasingly focused the family on isolation and doomsday prepping. Due to conspiracy-driven distrust of government (reinforced by the events at Ruby Ridge), Val and his wife LaRee (psuedonym Faye) were determined to keep their later children out of the system. This included not getting them birth certificates (or even remembering their exact birthdays) and preventing them from attending school. The family also refused to see doctors or go to the hospital, instead relying on LaRee’s herbal and homeopathic remedies.
The “Educated” title has layered meaning. Childhood Tara is uneducated in the traditional sense, with homeschooling practically non-existent, yet her mother educates her in herbal medicine and preserving food and midwifery, and her father educates her in scrapping metal and operating heavy machines. Tara then follows the lead of her brother Tyler in studying for the ACT (teaching herself the equivalent of several math classes in the process) and earns a score high enough to attend BYU on a scholarship. From there she begins both her formal education and her learning about society outside her family, including some painful lessons from both (e.g. telling a Jewish professor she doesn’t recognize the word “holocaust” and having roommates repeatedly remind her that people are expected to wash their hands after using the bathroom). Despite setbacks she succeeds and thrives, eventually winning a Gates Scholarship to Cambridge so she can advance her education there and beyond.
That’s the feel-good side of the book anyway. But Tara also tells another side, and with admirable honesty, which is why I refer to Educated as “raw”. There is child endangerment. There is avoidable injury. There is gaslighting. And there is a brother so abusive, so manipulative, and so goddamn evil that the pages stink of him. But with the assistance of her journals as well as feedback from siblings and an independent fact-checker, Tara does her best to truthfully relate each scene as she experienced it at the time, even going so far as to point out where she and other sources disagree on details of a particular event.
The only time I seriously doubted Tara’s story was when she described her group touring the roof of the chapel at King’s College, during which a professor comments on her ability to move around the heights comfortably while the other students appear more timid. This scene felt contrived to me because I couldn’t imagine a tour allowing students onto the roof of anything. But after minimal web-searching I will happily eat my serving of crow, as there is indeed a King's College chapel roof tour. Doubts assuaged.
As with most Educated readers (hrm hrm) I’m curious to see what (if anything) Tara will publish next and where life will take her. After what she has persevered through I hope it leads her someplace safe and happy.