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Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. As a way out, Tara began to educate herself, learning enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University. Her quest for knowledge would transform her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Tara Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes, and the will to change it.… (more)
Nickelini: Quite different views of Mormon life, but both books are compelling reads of young women who suffered through horrific lives under the control of domineering and manipulative men.
bjappleg8: Both books describe in intimate detail the supreme effort required to break free of fundamentalist beliefs and the pain of being cast out of their close-knit families as a result.
BookshelfMonstrosity: These wrenching autobiographies examine how parents with fiercely held beliefs can damage their children on multiple fronts. Forbidden from engaging with the rest of society in normal ways, the authors endured shattering psychological abuse before their eventual escape.… (more)
Carissa.Green: Sarah Smarsh's memoir is about a similarly-aged girl growing up in a rural area on the economic fringes, but Smarsh's memoir is more analytical and deals much less in the sensationalism of having a violent, mentally ill parent.
Ever since the Million Little Pieces debacle,* I view memoir with a jaundiced eye. That did not stop me from loving this story though; Westover made it effortless for me to keep reading. I would like to think it's the unvarnished truth but memoir does leave room for poetic license and embellishment.
Careful Googling will take one to You Tube videos of the author's mother and sister hawking their essential oils, and the mother sounds much more educated than she is given credit for in the book, but that could be me making assumptions about the intelligence and education level of a woman who would follow her crazy husband unquestioningly and who would sweep physical abuse under the rug for the sake of family harmony. Again though - memoir. Who knows what really happened? Not the reader, that's for sure.
*From Wikipedia: A Million Little Pieces is a book by James Frey, originally sold as a memoir and later marketed as a semi-fictional novel following accusations of literary forgery. ( )
I was barely able to finish this book. It makes me wonder if someone knew Tara’s story and sought her out to write this. She had a hard life growing up with a father who may have been bipolar. Able to get into BYU on a scholarship with a 28 ACT score...even though she was homeschooled. She then went on to Cambridge and Harvard all the while learning to teach herself. ( )
An interesting read, no doubt, but not quite what I was expecting or hoping.
I think I've given the book three stars because Westover wasn't quite as similar to me as I'd first thought or hoped. From a brief surface-level knowledge of the book, I was interested to hear what someone else's successful experience of the home schooled life was like. Like Westover, I grew up in a faith-filled household (though a few pages in, I saw that "faith-filled" was understood radically different by her parents and mine, not to mention "home schooling"). Like Westover, my first time setting foot into a public school classroom was to take a standardized test in high school.
But that's where the similarities ended.
Once I realized that Westover's home schooling was largely no schooling at all, I was interested to see how she built her own schooling from scratch. I was looking forward to reading about her self-education, how exactly she went from not knowing basic algebra at 15 to being accepted to a Cambridge scholarship at 17. I'm a sucker for those Nathaniel Bowditch-esque stories. I know Bill Gates reviewed this book and raved about Westover's self-education, but we honestly don't see a whole lot of it. We do get some of it, just a glimpse. But it's largely a "so I studied to an unhealthy degree and got As and here I am."
That being said, this book is not a book about "education" in the sense that most of us might think at first glance.
It's about becoming a whole person.
Educated is a horrifying look at what a life of abuse looks like, a life ruled by fear, a glimpse into what it looks like to begin to grow past that. Westover's current success isn't notable because she didn't go to public school. It's notable because she's survived a home life that proved a greater challenge than any lack of formal schooling could ever be. The book feels a little like sitting in on a long therapy session, actually. One where you kind of want to be excused but you're also morbidly fascinated by what the person is saying.
Honestly? I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing this review. It was a good book and well-written. It was a good read. It wasn't quite what I was hoping, that's for sure, but it's not like I regret reading it, either. I will say this: not all religious households are anything like Westover's, nor are all home schooling families! Most of us home schooled kids are so normal that we don't bother writing about it. While I thought at first I'd have a lot in common, my life growing up—my own education, the process of becoming a whole person—couldn't have possibly been more different than Westover's ... and I'm grateful for it. ( )
Audiobook. It took me a long time to dive into this book after enjoying several podcast interviews with Tara Westover. But the full story is so interesting! ( )
The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. - Virginia Woolf
I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing. - John Dewey
Dedication
For Tyler
First words
My strongest memory is not a memory.
Quotations
...I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had been wrested. (p. 180)
...something shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse who sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others--because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward. (p. 180)
I had decided to study no history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I'd felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement--since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected--a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought that if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history of most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught. Dad could be wrong, and the great historians Carlyle and Macauley and Trevelyan could be wrong, but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it. (p. 238)
It's strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. ... He had defined me to myself, and there's no greater power than that. (p. 199)
I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind, to be reshaped according to the contours of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself. (p. 239)
I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanized and brutalized others--because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward. (p. 180)
My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs. (P. 197)
This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect. (p. 111)
I believed then—and part of me will always believe—that my father’s words ought to be my own. (p. 172)
What was important to me wasn’t love or friendship, but my ability to lie convincingly to myself: to believe I was strong. I could never forgive Charles for knowing I wasn’t. (p. 189)
I wonder now if the day I set out to steal that tax return wasn’t the first time I left home to go to Buck’s Peak. That night I had entered my father’s house as an intruder. It was a shift in mental language, a surrendering of where I was from. My own words confirmed it. When other students asked where I was from, I said, “I’m from Idaho,” a phrase that, as many times as I’ve had to repeat it over the years, has never felt comfortable in my mouth. When you are part of a place, growing that moment in its soil, there’s never a need to say you’re from there. I never uttered the words “I’m from Idaho” until I’d left it. (p. 206)
I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head.” He stared at me blankly. He hadn’t understood. “I’m just standing,” I said. “You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.” “The way it is nothing to you,” he said. — I WANTED THE MIND of a scholar, but it seemed that Dr. Kerry saw in me the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in a library; I belonged in a crane. (p. 237)
...vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. (p. 327)
I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her. (p. 328)
Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. As a way out, Tara began to educate herself, learning enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University. Her quest for knowledge would transform her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Tara Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes, and the will to change it.
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This is a memoir of Tara whom was raised off the grid in Idaho with no education and isolated. Tara craved knowledge and once one of her brothers got into college she followed. She went to Cambridge and Harvard, but she wondered if she lost her way home. She shows how education can change ones life even though she came from a totally different upbringing.
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Careful Googling will take one to You Tube videos of the author's mother and sister hawking their essential oils, and the mother sounds much more educated than she is given credit for in the book, but that could be me making assumptions about the intelligence and education level of a woman who would follow her crazy husband unquestioningly and who would sweep physical abuse under the rug for the sake of family harmony. Again though - memoir. Who knows what really happened? Not the reader, that's for sure.
*From Wikipedia: A Million Little Pieces is a book by James Frey, originally sold as a memoir and later marketed as a semi-fictional novel following accusations of literary forgery. (