Educated – Tara Westover

Tara Westover’s memoir reads fresh, as it should as she is still a young woman and the events she relates took place within the last quarter century, a fact that often is hard to believe.

Born and raised in the wilds of Idaho in a Mormon family dominated by a father of increasingly extreme beliefs, she was denied registration of birth, access to mainstream healthcare and formal education for most of her childhood.  As were her six siblings to a greater or lesser extent; all expected, required even, to help out in the family concerns.  Father ran a scrapping and building business and her mother was a midwife and herbalist ministering to the many in the state who distrusted hospitals, doctors and drugs.  It was a dangerous environment but one that built resilience and fortitude.  It also made for bullying and submission to the paternal dogma of distrusting the government, its agencies and anyone outside the family.

Tara’s gradual, painful tearing away from her roots, not without false starts and setbacks, is related in searing fashion as her lack of elementary education clashes with her thirst for knowledge and her evident natural talent for academic study.

That conflict pales against that which forms the main theme of the book – family expectations and upbringing against the individual and self-determination, and her repeated and fruitless attempts to satisfy the demands of both.

The book succeeds on all fronts.  It is a fascinating and scary account of life in the backwoods; a harrowing account of a powerless girl at the mercy of her father and brothers; and an uplifting sermon on how an education can liberate and enable the mind to encompass, analyse and deal with seemingly irreconcilable forces.