Educated, memoir written by Tara Westover

“At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She [young Tara] was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house. That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. 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”.

This an incredibly powerful, poignant & heartbreaking memoir. Tara Westover was raised on the mountain Buck’s Peak (Clifton, ID) in a radical fundamentalist Mormon (FLDS) family of extreme survivalists. She lived everyday like it may be the last. She recounted her time as a child and took her father’s word higher than truth, as the word of God. They shunned the medical establishment, formal education, government and even their own family members who do not conform to their ideals. The Westovers’ lives were punctuated by many injuries, some of them incredibly serious. Her father often throwing them into imminent danger as they worked the junkyard, a brother that often beat her but would apologize afterwards (in a vicious cycle of abuse), and a mother that enabled this abuse. Several traumatic brain injuries and likely mental illness in at least the father & abusive brother have affected the Westovers in profound ways.

As Tara pursues formal education against her father’s wishes, her idea of who she is & can become waxes and wanes. She is torn between two lives – who she was on Buck’s Peak and who she is becoming. Many times, she had trouble seeing the abuse & continually return to her family despite walking away on many occasions thinking it would be the last. Abusers & their enablers (who were abused themselves) can trivialize, gaslight & distort reality to conform victims and this is what happened to Tara.

When this book was published in 2018, I saw her on multiple interviews but did not get a chance to read her book. On TV, she is extremely put together, emotionally in control, un-phased by her upbringing as she chose to walk away from her family. But the book presents a very different side of her. In the beginning she mentions that after her first assault by one of her brothers, she looked at herself in the mirror and saw herself as unbreakable, her tears were from the physical pain, not mental pain. As I read about her experiences, the gaslighting, the incredibly terrifying & violent attacks, she proves to be vulnerable, relatable, & deeply affected by the PTSD. She writes of her deep depression, inability to read or write & being shunned by her entire family. She is weakened by her love for her family and the innate desperate desire to be a part of that family.

When she finally walks away, there is no vindication. “But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. “
This is a story of family allegiance & loyalty is in conflict to oneself because it fails to protect them & grief that comes with severing ties. It is a story of reclaiming her own mind.

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them, and you could miss someone every day and still be glad they’re not in your life.” Tara Westover in an interview