Educated by Tara Westover | Review
I just finished Educated by Tara Westover this morning, and I am moved by the sheer magnitude of her memoir. At points, more points than I like to remember, I cringed as she recounts her abuse, both mental and physical. I found myself cheering her on as she surmounted obstacle after obstacle and found herself, reborn, a phoenix from the flames of knowledge and self-reflection. People may wonder why one would want to share such a tragic and painful story. Why relive it? As one who has come from abuse as a child, escaped it as an adolescent only to discover I had willingly jumped into the viper’s nest and stayed because I, one, didn’t know anything else, and two, didn’t think I was worthy of better, say how could you not tell this story? This story needs to be yelled from the rooftops — you are not alone. We see you. We stand with you.
Educated follows Westover’s unconventional childhood and escape from a family cult and the repercussions of that escape. Born into a family of survivalists and religious zealots, Westover’s story is filled with mental abuse at the hands of her mother and father and physical abuse from her older brother Shawn. As I read, I found myself remembering my own struggles to escape an abusive childhood only to wind up in a similar situation with a family reminiscent of Westover’s.
The number of similarities is striking between my own experience and Westover’s. Both we’re Mormon, both had unrealistic views of womanhood, both believed the government was out to get them, both “homeschooled,” if that’s what you want to call it, and both believed doctors were evil and antibiotics were poisonous. The Illuminate and Communisis came up a lot in my own story as it does in Westover’s. Along with these shadowy government figures were the Grays, the so-called government conspiracies of JFK and the moon landing, satellite surveillance, and vaccinations.
In my story, only the older boys went to school (a few years in elementary), and only one out of the six earned a GED. Much like the Westover children, each child was whip-smart, living more in one year than most children do in five. They could reroof a house, dig an outhouse, install solar panels, rebuild a car engine, and fix any manner of household issues. In a nutshell, when the end times came, they would survive.
In Educated, on two separate occasions, Westover family members were badly burned while working in the junkyard. These burns occurred while removing gas tanks from junked cars with a welding torch. As Westover describes the scenes and the burns, I was transported back to when my boyfriend sustained a horrible burn on his arm and upper chest when his pickup overheated and the radiator cap exploded jettisoning a molten combination of water and antifreeze onto him as he checked the engine. My friend and I sat in the truck cab when we saw his figure through the gap in the raised hood leap several feet in the air and begin screaming. Panicked, we didn’t know what to do, but a friend of his family was nearby called his mother after administering a Demerol. One of his brothers picked him up and returned him home where he was slathered in homemade comfrey salve and given tinctures of goldenseal to prevent infection and a combination of lavender and mint oil for the pain. Unbeknownst to his mother, he continued taking bootleg Demoral for several days until the blistered flesh ceased to shoot pain into his brain. What astounds me in both Westover and my own story is that no one died or developed an infection. I would say these families were lucky. They would say it was the will of God.
What’s lacking in my story that Tara Westover’s contains in spades is physical abuse. While I did receive my share from my father in my preteen years, when my parents divorced these physical assaults ceased, excepted when I went to visit him. While the abuse I sustained at the hand of my father was mild compared to the abuse inflicted upon the Westover siblings by their older brother Shawn, abuse is abuse. As I read, I heard the voice of my therapist as I tried to downplay what my father had done to me; “Abuse should never happen, no matter how severe or slight. Never disregard what you’ve been through. It happened.” What people who haven’t been through physical abuse may not understand is the mental component. In Westover’s story, her parents turned a blind eye to what Shawn did to his siblings. In my case, it was my mother. The lack of acknowledgment and protection hurts just as much as the punches and slaps, the kicks, and the terror. Sometimes it hurts more. We can reconcile the bruises. They fade. The gaslighting that occurs afterward does not.
Educated is one of the most well-written memories I’ve read. Tara Westover’s language paints vivid pictures of a family living in the shadow of their mentally ill patriarch. It shows a family so consumed with their way of thinking that they see every outcome to an action as affirming their path of righteousness. Educated gives hope to those who have sustained abuse; you can get out and you can thrive. Tara Westover’s climb from the mountain she calls home is taken in steps and measures. To leave everything that you know is not something done with a clean break. Westover’s journey is inspiring and you can’t help but root for her the entire book.
