Educated.

In her memoir Educated, Dr. Tara Westover describes her upbringing off the grid by survivalist Mormon parents, including a father who she describes as suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder and a physically abusive older brother, and the price she paid for leaving that world by going to university and beyond. It’s a maddening read, and often grueling given the family’s refusal to seek medical treatment even when family members suffer gruesome accidents, but the ultimate message is that Westover did get out and establish herself as an independent adult in a way her parents would never have allowed had she stayed.

Westover’s father is indeed a Mormon, but is more completely described as an extremist, with a violent, anti-government, apocalyptic worldview that has far more in common with hardline Islamists than with mainstream LDS adherents. He refuses to send his children to school and doesn’t even get the younger ones proper birth certificates or social security numbers. He makes money running cash businesses like scrap collection and some construction work, risking grievous injury to his children, more than enough that a state authority should have stepped in at some point and removed the kids for their own protection. The state of Idaho appears to take no interest in the Westovers, however, even when he removes his older children, who did briefly attend public school, and doesn’t bother to home-school them. Meanwhile, as Tara gets older and especially when a local boy takes an interest in her, she finds herself increasingly targeted by Shawn, her violent, controlling older brother, whose behavior becomes even more erratic after multiple head injuries.

So much in this book is appalling, not the least of which is the willful ignorance of just about every adult who comes into contact with Tara and her siblings – and that includes her subservient mother, who does nothing to stop Shawn’s abuse, and who later becomes a successful charlatan purveying essential oils (and, from what I can see online, making all kinds of fraudulent medical claims about their powers) and “balancing” chakras. There are other adults in the town near where the Westovers live who have some idea of what’s amiss with the family, such as the total lack of home-schooling or the child labor occurring at their homestead, but appear to do nothing. Tara’s attempts to stand up for herself are nearly always undermined by the lack of support from anyone except, occasionally, one of her older siblings, although even her older sister Audrey – an earlier target of Shawn’s abuse – lets her down in this regard, leaving Tara no choice but to sever relations with her parents and most of her siblings if she wants to lead an independent life.

Westover takes pains in a one-paragraph introduction to say that she rejects any interpretation of her book as an indictment of Mormonism or organized religion, and there’s some merit to her implicit argument here that the real villain in the story is her father’s untreated mental illness. It is hard to read Educated, however, without seeing their church as complicit in the cycle of abuse and subjugation in the Westover family: Girls are raised to be wives and mothers, not to be educated, and certainly not to be independent in thought or deed of their husbands. There’s more than just familial pressure on Tara to stay in Idaho rather than pursue a formal education for the first time, starting at Cambridge and later continuing at Harvard – where her parents visit her to make one apparently last effort to bring her back into the fold from Satan’s clutches.

Her decision to pursue that education, after much soul-searching and a battle within herself to make a decision in her own best interests for what might have been the first time, results in some seriocomic moments that had to be excruciating for Tara to experience in the moment. She went to college having never heard of the Holocaust, with little to no sense of the existence of the civil rights movement, and ignorant of most aspects of modern Western culture. It’s a testament to her own natural intelligence that she was able to score highly enough on the ACTs to get into college at all, and that she was able to catch up on the equivalent of several years of material to be able to take age-appropriate classes once at Cambridge. It’s also incredibly aggravating to read this and think of all the Tara Westovers likely living out in the hinterlands who never get the opportunity to pursue their educations, or never even learn of the world beyond the borders of their homesteads or towns. She’s the lucky one, who got out, and realized that so much of what her parents and her church had taught her was false. She’s also probably the tip of a much larger iceberg of girls and women whose potential and agency are wasted by ignorance and superstition.

Tara is now Dr. Westover, and her story is still going, so Educated doesn’t conclude the tangible parts of the narrative; this is a memoir of personal growth, and of what Dr. Westover endured and ultimately sacrificed to become an independent woman who has rejected the core tenets that most of her immediate family hold. She seems torn in the last few chapters of the book between her choices and what she left behind, to the point that she seemed to be apologizing on behalf of the many family members, most importantly her parents, who will never apologize, and who seem to think she’s the one in the wrong. The catharsis here is not ours to demand, but I wanted one, a final break, an acknowledgement that her parents, with the help of their church, did her numerous wrongs, and with her brother have dealt her damage from which she will probably spend the rest of her life recovering.

Next up: I’m halfway through David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.