Educated by Tara Westover

I haven’t posted for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. I’ve gotten into a backlog of writing about the books because I’ve been so busy moving houses for the summer, keeping up with my New York Mets this season (yikes), and just completed a road trip from New York City to Texas. So, in these upcoming posts, I’ll be playing catch up on posts for the books I’ve read in the past few months. 

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Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about everything that has gone into me being the person I am today, where I am today, and the path my life is on. Every time I reflect on this topic, it’s always clear to me that with the smallest changes to my life, where I’m at now today could be drastically different. If I wouldn’t have joined that soccer team growing up or enrolled in different classes my first semester of college who knows where I would be. The possibilities are endless. 

Thinking about life in this way always makes me think of one of my favorite movies, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, a Duplass Brothers film starring Jason Segel and Ed Helms. In the movie, Jason Segel’s character, Jeff, coincidentally lives at home in his mom’s basement as a pothead 30-year-old obsessing over the movie Signs and the seemingly random events of the movie that ultimately lead to “a perfect moment.” Likewise, Jeff believes that all of the random moments in his life are leading to a perfect moment. After receiving a wrong number call for someone named Kevin, Jeff’s trip to the store for some wood glue turns into a karmic journey to find out his destiny. 

“Everyone and everything is interconnected in this universe. Stay pure of heart and you will see the signs. Follow the signs, and you will uncover your destiny.” –Jeff, who lives at home

Whenever I read memoirs, I always love how authors seem to connect life events and stories into a common theme of the book. I am always amazed at a writer’s ability to reflect on a seemingly insignificant occurrence or anecdote and relate the story to a broader theme where everyone and everything is interconnected.

In the memoir Educated by Tara Westover, Westover recounts her life growing up in a survivalist Mormon household in rural Idaho. Her father had very extreme, non-mainstream views about society, government, religion, and the entire world. He was a doomsday prepper, convincing his family that the world was going to end multiple times, including Y2K, hoarding guns and supplies on a mountain in Idaho for the “abomination of man.” Because of Westover’s father’s worldviews, her family didn’t interact with the world in a normal way at all. She grew up thinking modern medicine was the work of the devil, negatively impacting her family in multiple ways. She didn’t step foot in the educational system before finally stepping foot in the classroom at age 17. Instead of going to school, Tara and her six siblings worked with for their reckless father in the junkyards scrapping metal and materials. Tara’s father was absolutely insane. Reading through Tara’s childhood upbringing made me think her father had hemorrhoids in his brain. I have no idea how she survived. 

When she got sick of working for her father, Tara taught herself trigonometry and other ACT test-prep knowledge with the help of one of her older brothers in order to eventually score high enough to be accepted into Brigham Young University. When she first got to BYU, she had never heard of slavery, the Holocaust and World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement. After initially struggling to fit in academically and socially, Westover went on to ultimately succeed in her studies, all the way to Harvard before finally attending Cambridge University for her doctorate. 

While the childhood stories shared in the first half of the book were difficult to read, yet impossible to look away from, the most interesting part of the book to me was whenever Tara finally escaped the environment around her, but struggled to let go of her past. She was extremely excited about her school life, yet felt pulled back to her family’s mountain in Idaho, to go back and love and remain loyal to her debilitating family that believed a woman’s place was never in the classroom, but rather in the kitchen. Because of this, Tara struggles in the book with what it means to be a woman, a Mormon, and simply herself. 

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

Throughout the book, Tara struggles with trying to trust her own perceptions of her new surroundings rather than the beliefs that she was indoctrinated with her whole life. She eventually comes to the conclusion, 

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

Have you ever been at a family gathering with extended family all around you, including maybe that “fun uncle” or that aunt that seems to have a perfect life on Facebook that you used to look up to as heroes and role models and want to be like them whenever you’re older? Except now that you’re older, you look at those same extended relatives that you used to look up to so much and you’d rather get smashed in the head with a steel chair repeatedly from John Cena than have to listen to their political views for a mere five minutes—have you ever experienced that? Tara’s life was such an extreme version of that, but with her direct family. You still love your family members even though their bigoted worldviews cause bleeding from the ears, but now you recognize that they are no longer heroes and role models and you realize their limitations as people. For Tara, finally being able to acknowledge her father’s limitations after such a traumatic childhood while also still loving him and wanting to stay loyal to her family was extremely conflictive. Not only that, whenever she was forced was to endure her family disowning her for pursuing her education, Tara had to come to grips with the significance of her education, the purpose of her life, and the meaning of her existence in order to keep living her life for herself.

In the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, the filmmakers focus on the strangeness of everything that surrounded the Rajneeshpuram community located in Wasco County, Oregon led by Indian spiritual sex guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho). Many stories about shocking and abnormal cultures do focus on the strangeness of the people and events involved in the story. For Tara, she doesn’t write in a bitter or accusatory tone when describing her upbringing in the Mormon church or her childhood home. Tara didn’t focus on the strangeness of the people and upbringing she experienced. Instead, she simply let the circumstances speak for themselves while also still revering her upbringing and family. 

She begins the book by explaining that the following story isn’t an attack on the Mormon faith or their belief system. She describes events in the book in a painfully candid way without also going the extra mile to seem bitter or hateful towards the people and circumstances. In this way, she shows respect to her family and upbringing, recognizing that every part of her upbringing has helped shape her into the person she is today. 

“I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.”

“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.”

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”

When dealt a subpar hand in life and you look around and see everyone else has enjoyed better circumstances, it can be so easy to become bitter and fall into thinking the grass is always greener. I liked that Westover writes the book in a way that acknowledges that even though she has escaped the mountain in Idaho and her family’s clutches, she has always been the same person and will continue to be the same person, while being unashamed of her upbringing. She realizes that her past, present, and future are all connected and she can’t run away from that. Like Jeff said, everything and everyone is interconnected in this universe. 

And that’s the way I read it.