I’ve never met a Mormon woman who wasn’t obsessed with memories.
Tara Westover is no exception.
Educated: A Memoir is the story of Tara’s life until now, from her childhood on the side of a mountain in Idaho—no formal schooling, of course—through her decision to go to college, learn how to live in the “mainstream world,” and eventually get a PhD. It’s an exploration of memory and how we write history—just as much about Tara sorting through the shifting and morphing memories of her childhood than anything else.
It’s a story about education, yes, but also about family dynamics, what happens when one chooses to live set apart from the mainstream, abuse, coming-of-age, memory, and most of all, Mormonism.
I have a lot of thoughts, obviously, but no clear conclusion. It’s an interesting book in that it holds up a mirror to the reader in ways that we might not expect—which makes me suspect it a little bit. (More on that later.)
Tara and I share a lot in common. We’re the same age, and like her I had never heard of the Twin Towers until they fell on 9/11 (it’s not just a backwoods Idaho homeschooling thing, although I grew up one state away). I grew to really empathize with Tara by the end of the book, as she struggled to reconcile herself with her family. All families have problems, and while mine are but a tiny blip on the scale of abuse compared to hers, the sheer cartoonish realism of her family helped me put some of my own experiences in perspective.
One of the more memorable bits in the book, to me, was a part where Tara emails her mother about an abusive situation at home. In the moment, her mother agrees with her and Tara thinks that she has the support that she needs to stand up to her father. But when she actually goes to confront him, she realizes that what her mother had said was merely reflecting back to her what Tara herself needed/wanted to hear. Total house of cards. This happens multiple times, where people would say one thing in sober mind, but then completely recant when back under the influence of the abuser.
As Tara sorts through all that happened to her, she comes to doubt her own memories and her own perception of what happened. It makes sense that different people will remember past events differently (especially when they involve trauma, and why you need multiple eyewitness accounts for a truer picture), but DARVO is a real tactic used by real abusers.
That’s gotta make you feel crazy. It also made me start to wonder about the reliability of Tara as a narrator.
Something about her story feels too on-point for me. She’s raised in the backwoods of Idaho by a larger-than-life version of the people who think God created the Remington bolt-action rifle to fight the dinosaurs and the homosexuals. (And I don’t say that to be funny. That 13 second clip has done so much to fracture America, don’t even get me started.) Her family is made even more dramatic and scary through the abuse of her brother and the burn wounds of her father. She escapes the fate of her sister and sisters-in-law by going to college, where after a heroic struggle becomes a perfect student. She even gets her Harry Potter-charmed life at Cambridge complete with choirs and house meals in the great hall.
I mean, college-aged me would have romanticized the hell out of her life.
But literally being in the Middle East when Osama bin Laden got taken out? Come on. Even lampshading that event as she’s describing it had me thinking “Is this girl for real?”
Truth is often stranger than fiction, but when your story provides easy opportunities to dunk on the n-word, the Illuminati, and white supremacy, while simultaneously tying homeschooling and skepticism of the medical establishment to the trash-strewn backwoods of Idaho that are clearly meant to be left behind—I start to notice how closely your truth reinforces the Current Narrative.
When there are footnotes all over the book defining conflicting versions of events, I understand. Memory is a slippery thing. When there are disclaimers like “The italicized language in the description of the referenced exchange is paraphrased, not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved” on quotes of the emails sent from other people, I get that maaaaaybe your academic pride want to keep the prose clean and free from the “errors” made by the other party in the exchange.
But when both of those things exist in context of a very convenient narrative, can you blame me when I get a little bit suspicious? I didn’t learn how to “close read” a text for nothing.
Then I feel bad for questioning the victim. You can never doubt a victim, you know.
So let’s believe her story.
Even then, what bothers me the most about the book is how little it addresses Mormonism.
Tara’s family are Mormons. The Mormon church plays a background role through the whole book. Tara’s dissertation topic involves Mormonism, something she’s proud of because she views it dispassionately, as a scholar not an acolyte. A large, softly-spoken part of the story is her distancing from the faith of her childhood, dramatized when she refuses the offer of a priesthood blessing from her father.
I know a little bit about the Mormon church. I’m not an expert by any means, but I have some background. And from what I know, this would be a huge deal.
The center of Mormon faith is the family—and the family revolves around the patriarch. Families are forever—so a woman can never truly escape her husband. Even if he’s delusional and bipolar. Even if he’s enabling his abusive son to terrorize the rest of his family. Even if that means agreeing with your daughter in private, but turning on her in public.
This memoir never addresses it baldly, the impact that Mormon family dynamics have on the rest of the story. There’s this conflation, this blurring between Mormonism and small-town Idaho, with prepping and unschooling and essential oils. No question of how the Mormon church structure, or its beliefs, contributes to the abuse. No question about how this could happen in a community, under the eye of a church, without anybody saying something. Maybe that’s just how the Mormon church operates.
Let’s talk geography for a moment. Tara’s hometown of Clifton is about 120 miles from Salt Lake City. Contrast that with North Idaho, which is a 600 mile drive from Clifton. North Idaho is where the Ruby Ridge standoff occurred, which features prominently in Tara’s fake memories from her childhood. These memories set the tone for how we should view her family: preppers, permanently at odds with the federal government, possibly white supremacists. But not Mormons.
By the end of the book, Tara confronts herself—but I never feel like she confronted her faith. She sidesteps away.
As I finish the book, I’m feel that I’m meant to come away with the impression that everyone who distrusts the federal government is guilty of something (anything from not getting a birth certificate for your kids to being a white supremacist, take your pick). That you should get educated, let you go astray from the Current Narrative. That this book is meant to warn us MAGA-country folk away from our lives of sin, and to reinforce to the city-folk that us country folk are ignorant and worthy of scorn.
I will say this: Tara’s struggle with reconciling her father’s world with the “real” world tugged at my heartstrings. I deal with this myself, trying to figure out how to reconcile my knowledge of the spiritual world with how to live in the world that we see every day. I certainly would not want to condemn my own children to a life of economic dependency because of my beliefs, no matter how strong.
So thank you, Tara, for giving me an example of what can happen when we withdraw too much from the world.
God calls us to be wise as serpents an innocent as doves. Educated provides an example of how difficult it is to walk that line.
As with all of the Very Personal Review series, I’m no expert in this category. I can’t always connect a book with broad context or deep history, but I still like to share my experience and thoughts.
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