THANK YOU UNDERSTANDING ABOUT PROJECT DELAYS AND THANK YOU FOR LEAVING A COMMENT IF YOU'RE READING! LOVE AND THANKS TO ALL MY READERS!
The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: Educated by Tara Westover
Details: Copyright 2018, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard.
Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.
When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University. There, she studied history, learning for the first time about pivotal world events like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This kept coming up in recommendations and I decided to give it a try.
How I Liked It:
Here's something you need to know about this book. It's almost universally praised. Certainly, it's a unique life story (and we'll get into that), but why does this book seem to consume people? What is it about the book? I've got a theory.
But before we get into that, let's meet Tara Westover, our main character. Not even sure of her actual birthday as she was not born in a hospital and didn't have a birth certificate until much later, she's raised with her many siblings isolated and alone from even their grandparents, as her maternal grandparents live farther away and her paternal grandparents include her grandmother who spars constantly with her son, namely about his sprawling junkyard.
Westover and her siblings are not only largely denied proper schooling and medical care, they're denied pretty much everything outside of Westover's father's very small decided bubble. He raises his children with doomsday cult visions, and Westover grows up in the shadow of Ruby Ridge, described by her father as the government murdering an entire family for keeping their children out of public school (Westover is an adult before she learns the truth).
Becoming close to her older brother Tyler who was interested in attending college and encouraging of Westover's interests outside of the family (like music), Westover starts dipping her toes into experimenting with life outside of their family. Her father, as expected, disapproves, but she finds a strange ally in her mother who sneaks around Westover's father (attending a children's dance class, the costumes, even with adjustments by the teacher for Westover's family's beliefs, still earn condemnation from her father on the ride home from the performance, which Westover's mother pretends to agree, despite knowing what the costumes were ahead of time) to try to give her daughter at least a slightly more expanded life.
At least, so it is until her mother suffers a horrific head injury during one of the many times the family gets into a car accident. After months of prolonged sleep and debilitating blackouts, she gets heavily into herbalism and various forms of "alternative" healing.
Meanwhile, Westover discovers she loves to sing and has a talent for it, earning praise in their church. Her father even allows her to try out and perform in musicals away from the family. Her older brother "Shawn" (a pseudonym, one of many in the book; they're listed alphabetically in an author's note at the beginning) helps her and they develop a sweet relationship, until Westover starts nearing puberty and things get weird. His misogyny and many, many other issues (he'd had several untreated head injuries and several treated head injuries on top of those) lead him to accuse his young sister of sexual promiscuity and several times attempt to murder her, choking her unconscious before their begging mother pulls him off, trying frantically to reason with him. Witnessing the abuse which at least a few points becomes attempted murder, her brother Tyler fights off Shawn and again tries to lobby Westover to get out. Narrowly avoiding serious injury working on her father's scrap yard, Westover starts studying to go to Brigham Young on scholarship (her brother Tyler offers that they take homeschool kids), against her parents' wishes.
She's shocked when she arrives at the supposedly Christian college by behavior outside her family's cult. So sheltered is Westover she doesn't even recognize the word "Holocaust" and embarrasses herself in class (her professor and fellow students thought she was making a crass, tasteless joke). Bumbling around struggling to stay in college, Westover is none the less talented and impressive on her own, despite her upbringing and more importantly her realizing the limitations of her upbringing. But as many strides as she's made in the outside world of college, those seem to be violently erased when she returns home and in many ways, sees her family clearly for the first time, especially her father, who she realizes suffers from severe bipolar disorder. When she seems like she makes an inroad (her father, after nearly losing his life in a freak accident, starts taking an interest in her college classes during his recovery), things double down to erase it (her mother and father begin touting "miracle cures" and cite his recovery as an example and Westover catches them stretching the truth about various specific aspects of his accident and recovery).
Slowly opening up to people about her family situation, Westover takes advice to apply to study abroad in England, her world expanding even further, and even more she realizes the truth about her family. Things go from bad to worse when her sister confides that their brother Shawn abused her too, and has threatened to kill her for talking about it. Horrified, Westover tries to talk to their parents, especially after Shawn has an episode and is clearly abusing his wife (and they have a young child). But her parents won't hear it and eventually her sister lies and denies that she ever told Westover anything. Shawn threatens to kill Westover yet again, this time to the point where he not only brandishes a knife, but uses it (and places it in her hand covered with blood in front of their parents). Despite witnessing what happened, her parents later change their story to support Shawn and demonize Westover. Finally, a former girlfriend of Shawn's that Westover had witnessed him abuse denied this to Westover's parents, supporting their theory that Westover was "demonic".
Westover struggles, but receives support, as always, from her brother Tyler. After her maternal grandmother dies, she visits for the funeral, the book sadly catalogs the family's responses to her appearance. Some connected with her, some had even apologized for believing her father, most kept their distance, and some, though polite, it was obvious that they would not go against her father. She mentions writing to her mother several times and asking to see her, and her mother refusing unless Westover would see her father as well.
Westover finally decides the night both parents witnessed her brother trying to murder her and deciding to lie about it was a breaking point, as she realized she was not the person she once was that they raised (particularly her father) who would go along any further with such deception. She notes
The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones [my past self] 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. (pg 329)
The book is tirelessly (some might say tiringly, in places) noted with efforts to support Westover's account with as many facts as possible. When her version varies even minutely from the eye-witness accounts of incidents given by her still-in-contact brothers, she notes their version as well as the discrepancy. At times, Westover's stress and emphasis on the most accurate account of even the most minute details can sometimes weigh down the narrative flow, but does provide a greater understanding.
Got all that? If you haven't read the book yourself and are wondering about what the appeal to many is, you're probably assuming that the Horatio Alger aspect of Westover's story ("from 'home-schooled' to Harvard!") is its primary selling point. And I'm sure to some extent that's true.
But even more potent and certainly more compelling is the relatability of Westover's story.
Now you might be pausing here in understandable disbelief. "Relatability?" Isn't the whole point that her story is remarkable? How this child of a doomsday cult could escape and reach heights of academic success of which many can only dream literally the first time she even tried formal education? What's relatable about that?
Well, most people, thankfully, have not had to escape the doomsday cult in which they were raised and almost start from scratch with their world knowledge (learning she's studying French, her father derides French as a "socialist language" and to Westover's horror, she discovers her father's beliefs about the Holocaust come from Nazi propaganda). But I bet most people have to come to a point as adults where they realize some of the things they were taught in their family, even minute things, were wrong. That your parents are not infallible gods, but human beings.
Also probably finding a foothold with many readers are the family secrets, mass deceptions, and even outright lies of the Westover family, down to the isolation of members willing to go against the family.
While certainly your family hopefully is not as dysfunctional, manipulative, and outright dangerous as this one, don't all families, to a certain extent, have at least some sort of story that's the accepted truth, whether it is or not?
To say nothing of the abuse Westover suffers in the book. Her level of propriety, even at a young age, to cover for her family and pretend that all is fine and there's no cause for concern is a heartbreaking textbook example of abuse that too many know, if not from family, than from a domestic partner, or even from a workplace. When her brother Shawn suffers an episode and physically attacks her in a parking lot, attempting to pull her clothes off, she forces laughs for passersby so that they'll think the siblings are merely playing, all while she's suffering from what sounds like depersonalization.
There's been no shortage of stories about abusive/dysfunctional families in the last forty or so years alone, but part of what makes Westover's so haunting is its chilling authenticity: she details the complexity and contradictions of this situation. She truly loves her family. Her father and her abusive brother have beautiful, loving moments with her and are in no way one-note monsters, which makes them all the more frightening. Witnessing the complex dynamics that led her family to make the decisions they did, particularly the complicated and messy situation with her mother, Westover doesn't have easy, trite blame, or even any blame at all, something that frankly is more than warranted in all of this. She fully acknowledges the nuanced, multi-facetedness of the situation just as she does her own ultimate decisions with it. So many beats of her story (second-guessing that it was really that bad, second-guessing that it's not family that's to blame, it's outsiders, blaming herself because that's easier) are sadly pretty classic beats of abuse but told in a way that makes them feel immediately authentic rather than rote examples.
I go on a lot about memoir voice and the importance of developing a rapport with the reader. And there's a good reason for that, because in a book like this, a memoir voice can make or break it. The author is clearly brilliant and impressive as a scholar in addition to being an abuse survivor; is there a way to communicate that to the audience that doesn't make that same author also insufferable and sound bragging? It must be difficult, but this particular author pulled it off. Her work towards authenticity and absolute clarity and truth (more on that later) makes her winningly sincere to read at every step of her twisting journey. Somehow, she can be impressive and even richly praised by her laudable teachers and those conversations are depicted in the book and yet at no point does it seem like Westover's bragging or patting herself on the back. Instead, she takes you along for her struggle, her fish-out-of-water-ness and sense of imposter's syndrome and feelings of riches she does not deserve.
The book is heartbreaking, revolutionary, and frequently feels like a blow to the chest. It's an incredibly important read about the stories our families tell us and the stories we tell ourselves about our families. I don't know if its popularity comes from its aspirational qualities or the fact it eloquently speaks to an extreme in the commonality of human existence, but I do know it's an extremely well-written, consuming read.
Notable:
Seemingly trying to head off people misinterpreting her words at the pass, the author notes at the beginning:
This story is not about Mormonism. Neither is it about any other form of religious belief. In it there are many types of people, some believers, some not; some kind, some not. The author disputes any correlation, positive or negative, between the two. (Author's Note)
I scoffed a bit at this, but after reading the entire book, I see her point. Even those that were also Mormon like Westover's family, even those within their own church did not necessarily belong to her family's cult (not that she calls it that), are seen as outsiders. It's put into more stark terms when she attends a Mormon college, Brigham Young university.
I knew I should stop [doing schoolwork late Saturday night into Sunday morning]— this was the Lord’s time— but I hadn’t even started the assignment for music theory, which was due at seven A.M. on Monday. The Sabbath begins when I wake up, I reasoned, and kept working.
I awoke with my face pressed to the desk. The room was bright. I could hear [roommates] Shannon and Mary in the kitchen. I put on my Sunday dress and the three of us walked to church. Because it was a congregation of students, everyone was sitting with their roommates, so I settled into a pew with mine. Shannon immediately began chatting with the girl behind us. I looked around the chapel and was again struck by how many women were wearing skirts cut above the knee.
The girl talking to Shannon said we should come over that afternoon to see a movie. Mary and Shannon agreed but I shook my head. I didn’t watch movies on Sunday. Shannon rolled her eyes. “She’s very devout,” she whispered.
I’d always known that my father believed in a different God. As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. They believed in modesty; we practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal; we left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the Second Coming; we were actually prepared. For as long as I could remember, I’d known that the members of my own family were the only true Mormons I had ever known, and yet for some reason, here at this university, in this chapel, for the first time I felt the immensity of the gap. I understood now: I could
stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between.
The service ended and we filed into Sunday school. Shannon and Mary chose seats near the front. They saved me one but I hesitated, thinking of how I’d broken the Sabbath. I’d been here less than a week, and already I had robbed the Lord of an hour. Perhaps that was why Dad hadn’t wanted me to come: because he knew that by living with them, with people whose faith was less, I risked becoming like them.
Shannon waved to me and her V-neck plunged. I walked past her and folded myself into a corner, as far from Shannon and Mary as I could get. I was pleased by the familiarity of the arrangement: me, pressed into the corner, away from the other children, a precise reproduction of every Sunday school lesson from my childhood. It was the only sensation of familiarity I’d felt since coming to this place, and I relished it. (pgs 158 and 159)
_____________________________________________________________________________
It's obvious the author loves her family, even after everything. The backstories she shares about her parents and their motivations are occasionally heartbreaking, particularly given how it would ultimately play out.
In the valley, [mother] Faye tried to stop her ears against the constant gossip of a small town, whose opinions pushed in through the windows and crept under the doors. Mother often described herself as a pleaser: she said she couldn’t stop herself from speculating what people wanted her to be, and from contorting herself, compulsively, unwillingly, into whatever it was. Living in her respectable house in the center of town, crowded by four other houses, each so near anyone could peer through the windows and whisper a judgment, Faye felt trapped.
I’ve often imagined the moment when [father] Gene took Faye to the top of Buck’s Peak and she was, for the first time, unable to see the faces or hear the voices of the people in the town below. They were far away. Dwarfed by the mountain, hushed by the wind.
They were engaged soon after.
— (pg 27)
_________________________________________________________________________________
When the author starts waking up to the realities of the world, specifically realizing just how her father has lied to her (and to himself), it's utterly chilling. The author does an excellent job of putting you in her shoes as she's realizing just how sheltered she's been.
I searched my memories. In some ways the word “Holocaust” wasn’t wholly unfamiliar. Perhaps Mother had taught me about it, when we were picking rosehips or tincturing hawthorn. I did seem to have a vague knowledge that Jews had been killed somewhere, long ago. But I’d thought it was a small conflict, like the Boston Massacre, which Dad talked about a lot, in which half a dozen people had been martyred by a tyrannical
government. To have misunderstood it on this scale— five versus six million— seemed impossible. (pgs 157 and 158)
If you want, you can insert some wry commentary about the current GOP, including their frontrunner for President in Florida and what he's trying to do to the school system.
Then the world had turned upside down: I had entered a university, where I’d wandered into an auditorium and listened, eyes wide, mind buzzing, to lectures on American history. The professor was Dr. Richard Kimball, and he had a resonant, contemplative voice. I knew about slavery; I’d heard Dad talk about it, and I’d read about it in Dad’s favorite book on the American founding. I had read that slaves in colonial times were happier and more free than their masters, because the masters were burdened with the cost of their care. That had made sense to me.
The day Dr. Kimball lectured on slavery, he filled the overhead screen with a charcoal sketch of a slave market. The screen was large; as in a movie theater it dominated the room. The sketch was chaotic. Women stood, naked or half naked, and chained, while men circled them. The projector clacked. The next image was a photograph, black and white and blurred with age. Faded and overexposed, the image is iconic. In it a man sits, stripped above the waist, exposing for the camera a map of raised, crisscrossing scars. The flesh hardly looks like flesh, from what has been
done to it.
I saw many more images in the coming weeks. I’d heard of the Great Depression years before when I’d played Annie, but the slides of men in hats and long coats lined up in front of soup kitchens were new to me. When Dr. Kimball lectured on World War II, the screen showed rows of fighter planes interspersed with the skeletal remains of bombed cities. There were faces mixed in— FDR, Hitler, Stalin. Then World War II faded with the lights of the projector.
The next time I entered the auditorium there were new faces on the screen and they were black. There hadn’t been a black face on that screen— at least none that I remembered— since the lectures on slavery. I’d forgotten about them, these other Americans who were foreign to me. I had not tried to imagine the end of slavery: surely the call of justice had been heard by all, and the issue had been resolved. This was my state of mind when Dr. Kimball began to lecture on something called the civil rights movement. A date appeared on the screen: 1963. I figured there’d been a mistake. I recalled that the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued in 1863. I couldn’t account for that hundred years, so I assumed it was a typo. I copied the date into my notes with a question mark, but as more photographs flashed across the screen, it became clear which century the professor meant. The photos were black and white but their subjects were modern—vibrant, well defined. They were not dry stills from another era; they captured movement. Marches. Police. Firefighters turning hoses on young men.
Dr. Kimball recited names I’d never heard. He began with Rosa Parks. An image appeared of a policeman pressing a woman’s finger into an ink sponge. Dr. Kimball said she’d taken a seat on a bus. I understood him as saying she had stolen the seat, although it seemed an odd thing to steal.
Her image was replaced by another, of a black boy in a white shirt, tie and round-brimmed hat. I didn’t hear his story. I was still wondering at Rosa Parks, and how someone could steal a bus seat. Then the image was of a corpse and I heard Dr. Kimball say, “They pulled his body from the river.”
There was a date beneath the image: 1955. I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be
measured in the lives of people I knew. The calculation was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts—the fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother’s face.
The next name was Martin Luther King Jr. I had never seen his face before, or heard his name, and it was several minutes before I understood that Dr. Kimball didn’t mean Martin Luther, who I had heard of. It took several more minutes for me to connect the name with the image on the screen— of a dark-skinned man standing in front of a white marble temple and surrounded by a vast crowd. I had only just understood who he was and why he was speaking when I was told he had been murdered. I was still ignorant enough to be surprised. (pgs 177, 178, and 179)
All that education is especially pertinent, as Westover's brother Shawn loves to "jokingly" refer to her as the n-word, a word she had absolutely no idea what it meant until she attended college and is now horrified by, much to his delight. Slurs will be altered here in a way that they aren't in the text.
“Our n____r's back!”
I don’t know what Shawn saw on my face— whether it was shock, anger or a vacant expression. Whatever it was, he was delighted by it. He’d found a vulnerability, a tender spot. It was too late to feign indifference.
“Don’t call me that,” I said. “You don’t know what it means.”
“Sure I do,” he said. “You’ve got black all over your face, like a n____r!”
For the rest of the afternoon— for the rest of the summer— I was N____r. I’d answered to it a thousand times before with indifference. If anything, I’d been amused and thought Shawn was clever. Now it made me want to gag him. Or sit him down with a history book, as long as it wasn’t the one Dad still kept in the living room, under the framed copy of the Constitution.
I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place, that word transported me. Every time he said it— “Hey
N____r, raise the boom” or “Fetch me a level, N____r”— I returned to the university, to that auditorium, where I had watched human history unfold and wondered at my place in it. The stories of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and
Martin Luther King were called to my mind every time Shawn shouted, “N____r, move to the next row.” I saw their faces superimposed on every purlin Shawn welded into place that summer, so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.
I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will ever think of him that way. But something had shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my
father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others— because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.
I could not have articulated this, not as I sweated through those searing afternoons in the forklift. I did not have the language I have now. But I understood this one fact: that a thousand times I had been called N____r,
and laughed, and now I could not laugh. The word and the way Shawn said it hadn’t changed; only my ears were different. They no longer heard the jingle of a joke in it. What they heard was a signal, a call through time,
which was answered with a mounting conviction: that never again would I allow myself to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand. (pgs 179, 180, 181)
I was ready to be dismissive of a white person using a word with a hideous history to relate to her own sense of selfhood outside of the cult, but the final paragraph made it clear that she realized she'd been complicit in oppression of marginalized people (something far bigger than she or her family) and never would be again.
And on that note, the specter of Ruby Ridge that loomed over her childhood has a shocking conclusion for her.
The bell rang. The auditorium emptied. I went to the computer lab. I hesitated for a moment over the keyboard— struck by a premonition that this was information I might regret knowing— then typed “Ruby Ridge” into the browser. According to Wikipedia, Ruby Ridge was the site of a deadly standoff between Randy Weaver and a number of Federal agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI.
The name Randy Weaver was familiar, and even as I read it I heard it falling from my father’s lips. Then the story as it had lived in my imagination for thirteen years began replaying in my mind: the shooting of a boy, then of his father, then of his mother. The Government had murdered the entire family, parents and children, to cover up what they had done.
I scrolled past the backstory to the first shooting. Federal agents had surrounded the Weaver cabin. The mission was surveillance only, and the Weavers were unaware of the agents until a dog began to bark. Believing the dog had sensed a wild animal, Randy’s fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, charged into the woods. The agents shot the dog, and Sammy, who was carrying a gun, opened fire. The resulting conflict left two dead: a federal agent and Sammy, who was retreating, running up the hill toward the cabin, when he was shot in the back.
I read on. The next day, Randy Weaver was shot, also in the back, while trying to visit his son’s body. The corpse was in the shed, and Randy was lifting the latch on the door, when a sniper took aim at his spine and missed.
His wife, Vicki, moved toward the door to help her husband and again the sniper opened fire. The bullet struck her in the head, killing her instantly as she held their ten-month-old daughter. For nine days the family huddled in
the cabin with their mother’s body, until finally negotiators ended the standoff and Randy Weaver was arrested.
I read this last line several times before I understood it. Randy Weaver was alive? Did Dad know?
I kept reading. The nation had been outraged. Articles had appeared in nearly every major newspaper blasting the government’s callous disregard for life. The Department of Justice had opened an investigation, and the Senate had held hearings. Both had recommended reforms to the rules of engagement, particularly concerning the use of deadly force.
The Weavers had filed a wrongful death suit for $200 million but settled out of court when the government offered Vicki’s three daughters $1 million each. Randy Weaver was awarded $100,000 and all charges, except two related to court appearances, were dropped. Randy Weaver had been interviewed by major news organizations and had even co-written a book with his daughter. He now made his living speaking at gun shows.
If it was a cover-up, it was a very bad one. There had been media coverage, official inquiries, oversight. Wasn’t that the measure of a democracy?
There was one thing I still didn’t understand: Why had federal agents surrounded Randy Weaver’s cabin in the first place? Why had Randy been targeted? I remembered Dad saying it could just as easy be us. Dad was always saying that one day the Government would come after folks who resisted its brainwashing, who didn’t put their kids in school. For thirteen years, I’d assumed that this was why the Government had come for Randy: to force his children into school.
I returned to the top of the page and read the whole entry again, but this time I didn’t skip the backstory. According to all the sources, including Randy Weaver himself, the conflict had begun when Randy sold two sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent he’d met at an Aryan Nations gathering. I read this sentence more than once, many times in fact. Then I understood: white supremacy was at the heart of this story, not homeschool. The government, it seemed, had never been in the habit of murdering people for not submitting their children to a public education. This seemed so obvious to me now, it was difficult to understand why I had ever believed anything else.
For one bitter moment, I thought Dad had lied. Then I remembered the fear on his face, the heavy rattling of his breath, and I felt certain that he’d really believed we were in danger. I reached for some explanation and
strange words came to mind, words I’d learned only minutes before: paranoia, mania, delusions of grandeur and persecution. And finally the story made sense— the one on the page, and the one that had lived in me through childhood. Dad must have read about Ruby Ridge or seen it on the news, and somehow as it passed through his feverish brain, it had ceased to be a story about someone else and had become a story about him. If the Government was after Randy Weaver, surely it must also be after Gene Westover, who’d been holding the front line in the war with the Illuminati for years. No longer content to read about the brave deeds of others, he had forged himself a helmet and mounted a nag. (pgs 208, 209, and 210)
Her parents visit her in college and they go out to eat and there's more unpleasant revelations where that came from.
We waited for the food, and Dad asked about my classes. I said I was studying French. “That’s a socialist language,” he said, then he lectured for twenty minutes on twentieth-century history. He said Jewish bankers in Europe had signed secret agreements to start World War II, and that they had colluded with Jews in America to pay for it. They had engineered the Holocaust, he said, because they would benefit financially from worldwide disorder. They had sent their own people to the gas chambers for money.
These ideas were familiar to me, but it took me a moment to remember where I’d heard them: in a lecture Dr. Kerry had given on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, published in 1903, purported to be a record of a secret meeting of powerful Jews planning world domination. The document was discredited as a fabrication but still it spread, fueling anti-Semitism in the decades before World War II. Adolf Hitler had written about the Protocols in Mein Kampf, claiming they were authentic, that they revealed the true nature of the Jewish people.
Dad was talking loudly, at a volume that would have suited a mountainside but was thunderous in the small restaurant. People at nearby tables had halted their own conversations and were sitting in silence, listening to ours. I regretted having chosen a restaurant so near my apartment.
Dad moved on from World War II to the United Nations, the European Union, and the imminent destruction of the world. He spoke as if the three were synonyms. The curry arrived and I focused my attention on it. Mother had grown tired of the lecture, and asked Dad to talk about something else.
“But the world is about to end!” he said. He was shouting now.
“Of course it is,” Mother said. “But let’s not discuss it over dinner.”
I put down my fork and stared at them. Of all the strange statements from the past half hour, for some reason this was the one that shocked me. The mere fact of them had never shocked me before. Everything they did had always made sense to me, adhering to a logic I understood. Perhaps it was the backdrop: Buck’s Peak was theirs and it camouflaged them, so that when I saw them there, surrounded by the loud, sharp relics of my childhood, the setting seemed to absorb them. At least it absorbed the noise. But here, so near the university, they seemed so unreal as to be almost mythic.
Dad looked at me, waiting for me to give an opinion, but I felt alienated from myself. I didn’t know who to be. On the mountain I slipped thoughtlessly into the voice of their daughter and acolyte. But here, I couldn’t seem to find the voice that, in the shadow of Buck’s Peak, came easily.
We walked to my apartment and I showed them my room. Mother shut the door, revealing a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. that I’d put up four years before, when I’d learned of the civil rights movement.
“Is that Martin Luther King?” Dad said. “Don’t you know he had ties to communism?” He chewed the waxy tissue where his lips had been [before his disfiguring, near-fatal accident].
They departed soon after to drive through the night. I watched them go, then took out my journal. It’s astonishing that I used to believe all this without the slightest suspicion, I wrote. The whole world was wrong; only Dad was right.
I thought of something Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, had told me over the phone a few days before. She said it had taken her years to convince Tyler to let her immunize their children, because some part of him still believed vaccines are a conspiracy by the Medical Establishment. Remembering that now, with Dad’s voice still ringing in my ears, I sneered at my brother. He’s a scientist! I wrote. How can he not see beyond their paranoia! I reread what I had written, and as I did so my scorn gave way to a sense of irony. Then again, I wrote. Perhaps I could mock Tyler with more credibility if I had not remembered, as I did just now, that to this day I have never been immunized. (pgs 247, 248, and 249)
After yet another difficult interaction with her family later on, Westover would get vaccinated.
________________________________________
I avoided Shawn. It was easy because he had a new girlfriend, Emily, and there was talk of a wedding. Shawn was twenty-eight; Emily was a senior in high school. Her temperament was compliant. Shawn played the same games with her he’d played with Sadie, testing his control. She never failed to follow his orders, quivering when he raised his voice, apologizing when he screamed at her. That their marriage would be manipulative and violent, I had no doubt— although those words were not mine. They had been given to me by the bishop, and I was still trying to wrest meaning from them. (pg 200)
That's right, an abusive adult man marrying a teenage girl still in high school, unsurprising in this setting, honestly.
However, in a much more concerning vein (even more concerning that throwing someone barely out of a childhood into a cult situation with a violent adult man), is Westover's father's lecture.
Dad had begun a new lecture, and this time I was present enough to hear it. He explained that little girls need to be instructed in how to behave appropriately around men, so as not to be too inviting. He’d noticed indecent habits in my sister’s daughters, the oldest of whom was six. (pg 287)
I really wonder after statements like that if physical assault, mental abuse, and various forms of child neglect were the only abuse the Westover daughters suffered.
________________________________________
Westover struggles to break out of her father's beliefs in many ways, including accepting financial help, but it was a long road.
The forms sat on my desk for a week before Robin walked with me to the post office and watched me hand them to the postal worker. It didn’t take long, a week, maybe two. I was cleaning houses in Draper when the mail came, so Robin left the letter on my bed with a note that I was a Commie now.
I tore open the envelope and a check fell onto my bed. For four thousand dollars. I felt greedy, then afraid of my greed. There was a contact number. I dialed it.
“There’s a problem,” I told the woman who answered. “The check is for four thousand dollars, but I only need fourteen hundred.”
The line was silent.
“Hello? Hello?”
“Let me get this straight,” the woman said. “You’re saying the check is for too much money? What do you want me to do?”
“If I send it back, could you send me another one? I only need fourteen hundred. For a root canal.”
“Look, honey,” she said. “You get that much because that’s how much you get. Cash it or don’t, it’s up to you.”
I had the root canal. I bought my textbooks, paid rent, and had money left over. The bishop said I should treat myself to something, but I said I couldn’t, I had to save the money. He told me I could afford to spend some. “Remember,” he said, “you can apply for the same amount next year.” I bought a new Sunday dress.
I’d believed the money would be used to control me, but what it did was enable me to keep my word to myself: for the first time, when I said I would never again work for my father, I believed it. (pgs 205 and 206)
________________________________________
If she was a fish out of water in college in the United States, she's really at a loss in England, but she receives assurance from a mentor after a fancy dinner at Cambridge.
“You’ve made an impression on Professor Steinberg,” Dr. Kerry said, falling into step beside me. “I only hope he has made some impression on you.”
I didn’t understand.
“Come this way,” he said, turning toward the chapel. “I have something to say to you.”
I walked behind him, noticing the silence of my own footfalls, aware that my Keds didn’t click elegantly on stone the way the heels worn by other girls did.
Dr. Kerry said he’d been watching me. “You act like someone who is impersonating someone else. And it’s as if you think your life depends on it.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“It has never occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone.” He waited for an explanation.
“I would enjoy serving the dinner,” I said, “more than eating it.”
Dr. Kerry smiled. “You should trust Professor Steinberg. If he says you’re a scholar— ‘pure gold,’ I heard him say—then you are.”
“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.”
“You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you
always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself— even gold appears dull in some lighting— but that is the illusion. And it always was.”
I wanted to believe him, to take his words and remake myself, but I’d never had that kind of faith. No matter how deeply I interred the memories, how tightly I shut my eyes against them, when I thought of my self, the images that came to mind were of that girl, in the bathroom, in the parking lot.
I couldn’t tell Dr. Kerry about that girl. I couldn’t tell him that the reason I couldn’t return to Cambridge was that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life. At BYU I could almost
forget, allow what had been to blend into what was. But the contrast here was too great, the world before my eyes too fantastical. The memories were more real— more believable— than the stone spires.
To myself I pretended there were other reasons I couldn’t belong at Cambridge, reasons having to do with class and status: that it was because I was poor, had grown up poor. Because I could stand in the wind on the chapel roof and not tilt. That was the person who didn’t belong in Cambridge: the roofer, not the whore. I can go to school, I had written in my journal that very afternoon. And I can buy new clothes. But I am still Tara Westover. I have done jobs no Cambridge student would do. Dress us any way you like, we are not the same. Clothes could not fix what was wrong with me. Something had rotted on the inside.
Whether Dr. Kerry suspected any part of this, I’m not sure. But he understood that I had fixated on clothes as the symbol of why I didn’t, and couldn’t, belong. It was the last thing he said to me before he walked away, leaving me rooted, astonished, beside that grand chapel.
“The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you,” he said. “Professor Steinberg says this is Pygmalion. Think of the story, Tara.” He paused, his eyes fierce, his voice piercing. “She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.” (pgs 242 and 243)
________________________________________
Westover discovers feminism, which she also discovers had been there for her all along.
I attended a seminar on Wednesday afternoons, where I noticed two women, Katrina and Sophie, who nearly always sat together. I never spoke to them until one afternoon a few weeks before Christmas, when they asked if I’d like to get a coffee. I’d never “gotten a coffee” before— I’d never even tasted coffee, because it is forbidden by the church— but I followed them across the street and into a café. The cashier was impatient so I chose at random. She passed me a doll-sized cup with a tablespoon of mud-colored liquid in it, and I looked longingly at the foamy mugs Katrina and Sophie carried to our table. They debated concepts from the lecture; I debated whether to drink my coffee.
They used complex phrases with ease. Some of them, like “the second wave,” I’d heard before even if I didn’t know what they meant; others, like “the hegemonic masculinity,” I couldn’t get my tongue around let alone my mind. I’d taken several sips of the grainy, acrid fluid before I understood that they were talking about feminism. I stared at them as if they were behind glass. I’d never heard anyone use the word “feminism” as anything but a reprimand. At BYU, “You sound like a feminist” signaled the end of the argument. It also signaled that I had lost.
I left the café and went to the library. After five minutes online and a few trips to the stacks, I was sitting in my usual place with a large pile of books written by what I now understood to be second-wave writers— Betty
Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir. I read only a few pages of each book before slamming it shut. I’d never seen the word “vagina” printed out, never said it aloud.
I returned to the Internet and then to the shelves, where I exchanged the books of the second wave for those that preceded the first— Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. I read through the afternoon and into the evening, developing for the first time a vocabulary for the uneasiness I’d felt since childhood.
From the moment I had first understood that my brother Richard was a boy and I was a girl, I had wanted to exchange his future for mine. My future was motherhood; his, fatherhood. They sounded similar but they were not. To be one was to be a decider. To preside. To call the family to order. To be the other was to be among those called.
I knew my yearning was unnatural. This knowledge, like so much of my self-knowledge, had come to me in the voice of people I knew, people I loved. All through the years that voice had been with me, whispering, wondering, worrying. That I was not right. That my dreams were perversions. That voice had many timbres, many tones. Sometimes it was my father’s voice; more often it was my own.
I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.
Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman.(pgs 258 and 259)
________________________________________________________________________________
Westover begins slowly separating herself from her family's beliefs and it's a mixed bag of emotions.
Dad had always said he wanted to build a room the size of a cruise ship but I’d never thought he’d have the money. I looked to Mother for an explanation but it was Dad who answered. The business was a roaring success, he explained. Essential oils were popular, and Mother had the best on the market. “Our oils are so good,” he said, “we’ve started eating into the profits of the large corporate producers. They know all about them
Westovers in Idaho.” Dad told me that one company had been so alarmed by the success of Mother’s oils, they had offered to buy her out for an astonishing three million dollars. My parents hadn’t even considered it. Healing was their calling. No amount of money could tempt them. Dad explained that they were taking the bulk of their profits and reconsecrating them to God in the form of supplies— food, fuel, maybe even a real bomb shelter. I suppressed a grin. From what I could tell, Dad was on track to become the best-funded lunatic in the Mountain West.
Richard appeared on the stairwell. He was finishing his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Idaho State. He’d come home for Christmas, and he’d brought his wife, Kami, and their one-month-old son, Donavan. When I’d met Kami a year before, just before the wedding, I’d been struck by how normal she was. Like Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, Kami was an outsider: she was a Mormon, but she was what Dad would have called “mainstream.” She thanked Mother for her herbal advice but seemed oblivious to the expectation that she renounce doctors. Donavan had been born in a hospital.
I wondered how Richard was navigating the turbulent waters between his normal wife and his abnormal parents. I watched him closely that night, and to me it seemed he was trying to live in both worlds, to be a loyal adherent
to all creeds. When my father condemned doctors as minions of Satan, Richard turned to Kami and gave a small laugh, as if Dad were joking. But when my father’s eyebrows rose, Richard’s expression changed to one of serious contemplation and accord. He seemed in a state of constant transition, phasing in and out of dimensions, unsure whether to be my father’s son or his wife’s husband. (pgs 260 and 261)
My parents arrived as the leaves began to turn, when campus was at its most beautiful, the reds and yellows of autumn mingling with the burgundy of colonial brick. With his hayseed grammar, denim shirt and lifetime member NRA cap, Dad would have always been out of place at Harvard, but his scarring intensified the effect. I had seen him many times in the years since the explosion, but it wasn’t until he came to Harvard, and I saw him set against my life there, that I realized how severely he’d disfigured himself. That awareness reached me through the eyes of others— strangers whose faces changed when he passed them in the street, who turned to get a second look. Then I would look at him, too, and notice how the skin on his chin was taut and plastic; how his lips lacked natural roundness; how his cheeks sucked inward at an angle that was almost skeletal. His right hand, which he often raised to point at some feature or other, was knotted and twisted, and when I gazed at it, set against Harvard’s antediluvian steeples and columns, it seemed to me the claw of some mythical creature. (pg 299)
My oldest brother, Tony, sat with my parents, his five children fanning out in the pew. Tony had a GED and had built a successful trucking company in Las Vegas, but it hadn’t survived the recession. Now he worked for my parents, as did Shawn and Luke and their wives, as well as Audrey and her husband, Benjamin. Now I thought about it, I realized that all my siblings, except Richard and Tyler, were economically dependent on my parents. My family was splitting down the middle— the three who had left the mountain, and the four who had stayed. The three with doctorates, and the four without high school diplomas. A chasm had appeared, and was growing. (pg 326)
A really interesting note, that financial freedom plays a huge role in the selling of the family's delusions and those that still need financial support cannot go against their father, even if he's waving away personally witnessed attempted murder.
________________________________________
Some of the most heartbreaking moments in the book come from Westover's mother. They're chatting online one night.
I asked about a memory. It was from the weeks before I’d left for BYU, after Shawn had had a particularly bad night. He’d brought Mother to tears, then plopped onto the sofa and turned on the TV. I’d found her sobbing at the kitchen table, and she’d asked me not to go to BYU. “You’re the only one strong enough to handle him,” she’d said. “I can’t, and your father can’t. It has to be you.”
I typed slowly, reluctantly: Do you remember telling me not to go to school, that I was the only one who could handle Shawn?
Yes, I remember that.
There was a pause, then more words appeared— words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them.
You were my child. I should have protected you.
I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and
I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.
I love you, I wrote, and closed my laptop. (pgs 271 and 272)
_____________________________________________________________
The book, frankly more than many memoirs I've read and I've read at least hundreds if not thousands, is fixated, sometimes distractingly from the narrative flow, on the absolute and complete truth. The author takes great, laborious pains to make it clear if she is recalling something differently from other witnesses and why. She seeks to back up her story in a way I didn't quite understand at first, rather than that this is her first memoir.
But it makes sense why, given that Westover's family attempted to seize the spotlight after the book's massive success. Her mother wrote her own memoir, creatively titled Educating, copies which she and her husband gave out to hopefully sympathetic reviewers, claiming that their daughter's book is lies, Westover was led by her therapist, and "Shawn" (real name Travis) would be the first to tell you he has a temper, but the mother never saw anything objectionable, and also her brilliant holy husband is just about the second coming, with their lawyer sniffing that Educated maybe "there's a little germ of truth" in it and it should be read with a grain of salt as it falsely portrays the family.
So it's understandable that Westover, literally estranged from her family in large part because her parents decided that her objecting to her brother repeatedly attempting to murder her and other family members was deeply inconvenient as well as embarrassing so they just won't believe it, would go to lengths to prove she's telling the truth, and be as honest as possible.
I think human memory, especially under duress, can be fallible, but I believe Westover and her siblings were victims of abuse and neglect (and Westover's brother did as she and others have said) and while her mother may have tried to help initially, her own adherence to the cult, strengthened after her health problems, have all but ensured that she would choose a side and it wouldn't be her daughter's. Add the financial strain and fear of isolation (and we're talking about a million-dollar business when it comes to her parents, according to Westover; once, when returning to her childhood home, one of her parents' employees mistakes her for an underling and orders her back to work) and even murder in the case of Westover's sister, and any qualms her less freed siblings might have to what happened to her would quickly dissipate.
She asterisks a story accordingly:
* Asked fifteen years later, Dwain did not recall being there. But he is there, vividly, in my memory (pg 145)
Several conversations she's concealed presumably because she'd be using hostile parties' written words without permission, so she makes this note:
The italics used on this page indicate that the language from the referenced email is paraphrased, not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved. (pg 269)
And she relies on her journals as back up:
I didn’t stay long on Buck’s Peak, maybe a week. On the day I left the mountain, Audrey asked me not to go. I have no memory of the conversation, but I remember writing the journal entry about it. I wrote it my first night back in Cambridge, while sitting on a stone bridge and staring up at King’s College Chapel. I remember the river, which was calm; I remember the slow drift of autumn leaves resting on the glassy surface. I remember the scratch of my pen moving across the page, recounting in detail, for a full eight pages, precisely what my sister had said. But the memory of her saying it is gone: it is as if I wrote in order to forget. (pg 279)
She gets unexpected (and unknowing, and unfriendly) support for her own memories that her family has pressured her to question:
While traveling in Utah for research, I would meet a young man who would bristle at my last name.
“Westover,” he would say, his face darkening. “Any relation to Shawn?”
“My brother.”
“Well, the last time I saw your brother,” he would say, emphasizing this last word as if he were spitting on it, “he had both hands wrapped around my cousin’s neck, and he was smashing her head into a brick wall. He would have killed her, if it weren’t for my grandfather.”
And there it was. A witness. An impartial account. But by the time I heard it, I no longer needed to hear it. The fever of self-doubt had broken long ago. That’s not to say I trusted my memory absolutely, but I trusted it
as much as I trusted anybody else’s, and more than some people’s.
But that was years away. (pgs 295 and 296)
She ends with this note.
Certain footnotes have been included to give a voice to memories that differ from mine. The notes concerning two stories— Luke’s burn and Shawn’s fall from the pallet— are significant and require additional commentary.
In both events, the discrepancies between accounts are many and varied. Take Luke’s burn. Everyone who was there that day either saw someone who wasn’t there, or failed to see someone who was. Dad saw Luke, and Luke saw Dad. Luke saw me, but I did not see Dad and Dad did not see me. I saw Richard and Richard saw me, but Richard did not see Dad, and neither Dad nor Luke saw Richard. What is one to make of such a carousel of contradiction? After all the turning around and round, when the music finally stops, the only person everyone can agree was actually present that day is Luke.
Shawn’s fall from the pallet is even more bewildering. I was not there. I heard my account from others, but was confident it was true because I’d heard it told that way for years, by many people, and because Tyler had heard the same story. He remembered it the way I did, fifteen years later. So I put it in writing. Then this other story appeared. There was no waiting, it insists. The chopper was called right away.
I’d be lying if I said these details are unimportant, that the “big picture” is the same no matter which version you believe. These details matter. Either my father sent Luke down the mountain alone, or he did not; either
he left Shawn in the sun with a serious head injury, or he did not. A different father, a different man, is born from those details.
I don’t know which account of Shawn’s fall to believe. More remarkably, I don’t know which account of Luke’s burn to believe, and I was there. I can return to that moment. Luke is on the grass. I look around me. There is no one else, no shadow of my father, not even the idea of him pushing in on the periphery of my memory. He is not there. But in Luke’s memory he is there, laying him gently in the bathtub, administering a homeopathic for shock.
What I take from this is a correction, not to my memory but to my understanding. 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. When one of my brothers first read my account of Shawn’s fall, he wrote to me: “I can’t imagine Dad calling 911. Shawn would have died first.” But maybe not. Maybe, after hearing his son’s skull crack, the desolate thud of bone and brain on concrete, our father was not the man we thought he would be, and assumed he had been for years after. I have always known that my father loves his children and powerfully; I have always believed that his hatred of doctors was more powerful. But maybe not. Maybe, in that moment, a moment of real crisis, his love subdued his fear and hatred both.
Maybe the real tragedy is that he could live in our minds this way, in my brother’s and mine, because his response in other moments— thousands of smaller dramas and lesser crises—had led us to see him in that role. To believe that should we fall, he would not intervene. We would die first.
We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories. Nothing has revealed that truth to me more than writing this memoir— trying to pin down the people I love on paper, to capture the whole meaning of them in a few words, which is of course impossible. This is the best I can do: to tell that other story next to the one I remember. Of a summer day, a fire, the smell of charred flesh, and a father helping his son down the mountain. (pgs 333 and 334)
Final Grade: A
I love your wonderful reviews, they are always illuminating.
ReplyDeleteI'm so sorry I'm only seeing this comment now! Thank you so much!
Delete