Review: Educated: A Memoir

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The words that kept running through my mind as I read this memoir were How sinister, how very sinister . That is the mood of her story.

The author, youngest of seven children, is the victim of a parental lunacy which borders on real evil. She recounts many acts of profound stupidity, stubbornness, and abuse, many which threatened her very life. If only half of them were true, it is astounding to me that she survived, much less went on to earn a PhD at Cambridge. I think it is all true, though.

I'd expect someone who suffered as much as she did at the hands of a sadistic older brother, a heartless and megalomaniacal father, and a double-crossing, self-absorbed mother, to be twitching in a corner with PTSD for decades. Tara fights tooth and nail for her sanity - for her escape.

Trapped for years - a hostage to ignorance and recklessness - she basically educated herself. Very impressive. She describes her parent's homeschool, but there doesn't seem to have been one. They weren't schooled at all. They just stayed home and worked.

I broke one of my cardinal rules when reading this book - I read the reviews of others. I do not do this until I've finished a book, but I found it hard to follow the ages of her siblings and their activities, so I looked for this info. When I did, I found her brother Tyler's review of this book and read it. I also found Drew's review (he was a close friend to Tara when she was in college). There was enough corroboration in these reviews to make me feel a little sick.

I found her starts and stops through college a great source of frustration, although a smooth and straight path could not be expected, I guess. I really wanted her to succeed and was rooting for her to snap out of it. Trauma isn't something you shrug off, though.

Three of the Westover kids went on to earn PhDs and this is an inexplicable, remarkable statistic given their circumstances.

While I read this book, I also read (at the same time) the book Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance. Their stories intersect on the highways of poverty, hopelessness, abuse and ruin. Vance seemed to come through his ordeals with less resentment than Westover. I believe he had more love in his storm-tossed days than did Westover. His memoir did not have the sinister mood. They each managed to achieve the most respectable educations available in the world but I think that Westover has not outrun her ghosts as well as Vance has outrun his. One can hardly blame her. Her mother's essential oils business took off - an undeserving slice of kismet - and her parents at the time of the writing were financially well off. This would be hard for any scrapyard-imprisoned, abused, and degraded young lady to accept.

It is hard to accept parents who throw their own kids to wolves and who believe their own lies so thoroughly. I am delighted that Tara survived to earn the education and respect she deserves and to share her story with the world.



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