Educated: A Memoir
Ratings636
Average rating4.4
15
Ratings636
Average rating4.4
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 forbade hospitals, 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.
Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important 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. 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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Wow. Devastating and so important. This is not just a relational trauma memoir but a record of a spiritual battle, a fight for the grounds of reality itself. A fight in which we will all, at some point, have to make our own stand.
Let me never, never, never try to hold someone hostage to my own world view. That is the genesis of evil.
“I could have my mother's love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.” Ch 39
THIS is what the struggle of the “end times” is about, not owning stupid hoards of food and gasoline and guns, but the ability to own your own thoughts, your own understanding, and through them to connect freely with others, not walled off in fearful isolation. The “end” refers to the end of the era when this was not fully in our own hands. Now it is. A terrifying, amazing prospect. And some have made it through, but many others are falling to the temptation to give themselves up, to bury themselves and remain dead rather than risk true life.
“Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.” Ch 40
Beautifully written and really captures the feeling of living within a dysfunctional family - albeit in the author's case, an extreme example. The feeling of choosing between having a family and having sanity is illustrated well.
Phenomenal
Unbelievable story that so beautifully offers most people a small or even big reflection of themselves. I'll forever be grateful for this story.
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