EDUCATED: A MEMOIR BY TARA WESTOVER

Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover, is an engrossing read about a young woman who leaves home to find the world is an extremely different place that what she has been told by her family.

When I was a kid at camp there was a couple other councilors I shared a bunk house with. One of them grabbed a cookie and took it with him into the bathroom. Their conversation went something like this:

“What are you doing in there with that cookie?”

“I’m eating it. That is usually what you do with cookies.”

“In the bathroom?”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t sanitary!”

When you leave home, you often learn new social rules to live by and the people you meet hopefully are gentle as they push you toward the group’s norms. Violate the norms and people look at you strangely. The room might go silent. Sometimes you lose friends.

For Tara, this transition was extreme because her family is extremely religious. She had never experienced modern medicine, hospital visits, immunizations, public or private schooling. Instead, she prepared with her family for the end of the world. They buried gasoline and weapons. They prepared caches of food and canned fruits. They read the Bible for advice on what to eat and what to pack. She was not homeschooled in any structured way. Her dad would take her out into a junkyard to collect scrap metal off of old wrecks. Her mom would make medicine based on local plant extracts. Interestingly, her mom was guided by the wisdom found in the sound of her nails clicking against bottles rather than a scientific process.

Tara was also abused physically by her brother. Her future seemed dark, but she sought out the outside community to sing, act, or dance. She met people who aspired to college. She tentatively explored a future away from her family.

Tara taught herself to pass college entrance exams and she was admitted to BYU. She embarrassed herself by being ignorant of the Holocaust, the civil rights movement, and the existence of slavery. Her housemates told her to wash herself and to wash her hands regularly. Her classmate had to tell her to read the words in her art book to pass the art class exams.

Despite these awkward first steps into the world Tara thrived and found her way into a PhD program at Harvard. Straddling these two worlds, Harvard University PhD student and extreme Mormon family member, caused stress and conflict in her life. Tara was forced to make choices about how to live in a way that contained both her own will to have self-determination and what family who would still accept her if she followed that path.

Educated is the story of a courageous woman who overcomes great personal challenges and it is told unflinchingly. It is one of the best books I have read this summer.