This memoir was not at all what I expected it to be. The cover of the book, at first glance a
giant red, sharpened pencil, gives the impression that the topic is about
school, maybe opinions of public education.
And although the author details her educational path, this memoir is
much more about abuse, neglect, violence, brainwashing, and mental health than
the author’s rise from all of it (through her education).
Tara Westover was born into a Mormon family in the
mountains of Idaho. She had six brothers
and sisters. Her father was obsessed
with preparing for the End of Days: digging a cellar in a hill and stocking it
with canned peaches, storing a huge gasoline tank underground, and stocking up
on guns and ammunition. He put his kids
to work scrapping in his junkyard, a dangerous task for anyone, let alone small
children. Tara’s father taught her that doctors
and medicine were sinful, education was sinful, and a woman’s place was in the
home. She thought she was homeschooled,
but her mother’s version of homeschooling was handing out textbooks and sending
her kids to their rooms for an hour.
Tara flipped through fifty pages of a math book, then report back to her
mother that she had done fifty pages of math.
The truth was she had no idea what she was looking at. When Tara reported that she wanted to go to
school, her father convinced her that the Lord would provide and there was no
need for school. So, Tara spent her days
helping her mom with her herbal remedies and her father in the junkyard. It wasn’t until one of her brothers, Shawn,
became super verbally and physically abusive that Tara made the decision to
leave the mountain life. She taught
herself math and took the ACT, without any schooling, and earned a high enough
score to get into BYU.
She was very much a fish out of water at BYU. Tara struggled in her first semester,
socially and in class. She didn’t know
history. She had never even heard of the
Holocaust. Through determination and
hard work, Tara fought her way through poverty and being an underdog
student. But a life altering lecture in psychology
opened her eyes to mental health disorders, including pi-polar disorder and schizophrenia. She started to understand her father.
Educated is the true story of Tara Westover’s
internal conflict between her father’s anti-main-streamed, anti-government, “head
for the hills” lifestyle and her own ideas and perspectives. The problem was that her father would not
allow her to have her own opinions; if she didn’t agree with him, then she was cut-off
from the family. You will have to read
for yourself how things turn bout for Tara.
-Five stars! Two-thumbs up! A must-read for any human who
seeks a greater knowledge!
