A Painful Journey in Educated


A good coming-of-age story lets us feel the growing pains of a character from beginning to end. Tara Westover’s depiction of herself in Educated shows a metamorphosis rife with conflict, so that by book’s end, we know she’s grown, but we wonder, along with her, if the agony was worth it.

Westover, in her mid-thirties when Educated debuted in 2018, grew up the youngest of seven in a survivalist family in Idaho, where her education consisted mainly of aiding her mother’s growing herbal remedies and midwifery practice. Her father ran a junkyard, scrapped metal, and built barns and sheds for a living. Through her father, Westover learned to operate heavy machinery, and to suck it up when the machines got the best of her: the on-the-job injuries she experiences under her father’s supervision are treated with mother’s home remedies, not western medicine.

As Westover enters her teens, she endures the near obsessive gaze of her brother Shawn, who deems her a whore for tending to her appearance, and beats the tar out of her many times over, while her parents do nothing. The abuse in the book is wretched, and Westover the writer does an exemplary job of showing us the detached, excuse-ridden mental gymnastics she went through anytime Shawn choked her or buried her face in the toilet. It is a real portrait of physical, emotional, and mental crimes, and the lies a victim believes in order to justify the abuser’s actions, that make the book so strong.

The good news for Westover is that she is smart; she parlays her intelligence into admission to Brigham Young University at 16 years old (or at least she was maybe 16 years old, which is hard to know since her family never got her a birth certificate). Equally interesting here is Westover’s journey through higher education. Having never attended a regular school, she uses shear determination and her limber intellect to succeed first at BYU, then Harvard, and eventually Cambridge for her PhD in history.

Despite her academic achievements, Westover still carries the emotional baggage of her family, one that denies her truth about her reproachful upbringing. The author skillfully describes how a dysfunctional family invests in keeping up the dysfunction, and the price she must pay once she stops participating. When her mental breakdown occurs as a result of leaving her old for her new life, it is a bitter-sweet move for Westover, and a gut-punch to the reader.

It was in a memoir writing class in the fall of 2018 where I first heard of Educated. It seems like since then, every fifth person I talked to about memoir writing today recommended it. So thank you to all those people for their insistence that I read Educated.



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