Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

This inspiring, beautifully written memoir of a young woman just took my breath away. In a brief look into a part of American life that few of us has experienced, Tara Westover astonishes the reader with the fierceness of her struggle to find her own way in the world and the sensitivity with which she renders it. She is the youngest of seven children of a fundalmentalist Mormon couple, survivalist also, for whom the local Mormon church is a little suspect, the government is anathema, the public school system is an evil indoctrination establishment, and modern medicine is a tool of Satan. None, none of the seven go to public school. Their home schooling is nominal at best.

Tara's father, brilliant and uneducated, keeps aloof from "The System" by running a junk yard on a cash basis and building barns and sheds locally, also on a cash basis. His beautiful, smart, subservient wife is a midwife with no formal training and a highly successful herbalist. As a helper in her father's work, Tara becomes adept at operating such medium heavy equipment as a forklift, a loader, a pea picker. Her maternal grandmother saves the day by advocating for college.

When Tara starts down the road toward college, she homestudies herself for the ACT, passing with results that qualify her to enter Brigham Young University. She is almost totally unsocialized for BYU, indeed for any college. Examples: she doesn't know about the Holocaust, has never heard of Napoleon, needs to be told to wash her hands on leaving the bathroom, to read her textbooks. Her raw intelligence and fierce effort propel her to success so great that after graduating from BYU, Cambridge University offers an all-expense scholarship through graduate school, where she also triumphs, getting a PhD in history.

At a cost. She misses the Indian Princess, the mountain in Idaho on whose side her family lives. Her attachment to its power and beauty is very nearly religious, whose qualities she sings in luminous prose. She struggles to reconcile the realities of her family (an older brother is alternately caring and physically abusive; her father refuses to recognize the abuse or to protect her from it)) and her attachment to the outside world she has come to know and value. In this effort, her success is partial. In her family of seven siblings, three of them have PhD's.

This an extraordinary book, extraordinarily well written, that takes us through a part of our culture that is opaque to most of us. I couldn't put it down. Also, for me, it has been a sadly needed education. But perhaps I can now say, as Tara Westover does of herself in her last sentence that I am now educated.