Educated: A Memoir

This memoir is exquisitely told and very reminiscent of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.  Like in The Glass Castle, Tara Westover grew up on the edge of society to eccentric parents.  Both stories also contain stories of abuse, Walls with abject neglect on her parents part and Westover’s physical and mental abuse by her violent older brother.  Westover’s tales of growing up will stick with you long after the story is finished.

Educated is a well-told story about Tara Westover growing up on a mountain in rural Idaho.  Her parents did not believe in formal education and kept them out of public school and out of the public records (like Tara didn’t have a birth certificate until she was nine years old).  Her scrapping father used her and her six siblings as labor in the junkyard, and her herbalist mother kept them away from the doctors.  The story takes you from about the time when she was ten years old until her adult life after finishing college, the second of her siblings to do so.  Some of the stories are humorous, like traveling with her brother on his semi-truck route, but most make you want to sweep into the story and give Westover a huge hug and say, “You’re doing the best that you can.”  Like when her family crashes their car (twice) on the drive from Arizona to Idaho or when her older brother falls on his head at a construction site or when her father burns himself horrifically while welding gas tanks off junked cars.  

One great lesson to pull from this story is tenacity.  There are many times when Tara could have given up.  She could have decided algebra and trigonometry were too hard to learn instead of putting in hours and hours of practice.  She could have stayed home instead of going to Bob Jones University.  She could have dropped out when she ran out of money instead of letting her roommate talk her into applying for a government grant.  But she didn’t.  She pushed through, even when classes didn’t make sense, even when it would have been easier to pack up her things and go.  The fact that she persevered is amazing and well worth reading her book. 

My one warning is for people who've experienced the psychological warping of abuse.  At times it is hard to read because Tara spends years pushing past the abuse, and it shows the cycle of abuse in a calculated way.  It shows her older brother's manipulation of the situation and of his power over her, and his ability to turn the rest of the family against Tara and against reality.  Just warning you from the start that it does get heavy.