311. Educated
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Tara Westover
Genre: Non Fiction, Memoir
334 pages, published February 20, 2018
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
Educated is a memoir by Tara Westover, a remarkable woman who grew up in large family from a very small town in Idaho. Her parents were Mormon survivalists and believed that public education was an indoctrination scheme by the Socialist government. Consequently, Tara never went to school until she got into BYU after obtaining a GED and taught herself enough math to perform sufficiently well on the SAT. She would go on to ultimately receive a PhD from Cambridge University. Educated is her story of that journey and the pain she had to endure at the hands of her parents and a few siblings who actively tried to undermine all of her efforts and, in the case of her brother Shawn, physically abused her to keep her in her place.
Quotes
“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
“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.”
“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”
“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I’m fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I’m not falling apart. I’m just lazy. Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”
“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”
“It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune.”
“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”
“There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”
“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.”
“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”
“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”
“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”
“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.
I call it an education”
My Take
Educated is an extremely well written, fascinating book that gives the reader an inside look at life growing up inside a Mormon fundamentalist, survivalist family in an isolated Idaho town. Raised by tyrannical, crazy father who denied her any type of education and a mother who refused to protect her from an abusive older brother, it is truly remarkable that Tara Westover would go on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University in the UK. While her story is incredibly impressive, I often grew frustrated by her continual, and I mean continual, efforts over many, many years to be a part of a family that so betrayed her. When she finally, finally realizes that what she seeks is not possible, my response was, “well, it’s about time!” Still, I highly recommend Educated, an engrossing book.
