6. Educated

Educated. Tara Westover. 2018.

So, 2019 was not a good year for memoirs.  It seems like I read so many of them and that the vast majority of them were just terrible.  When this one was recommended to me by my college friend, Nancy (a different Nancy than the one who would have loved The Overstory), I was not excited.  In fact, at first I thought this was the book by Malala Yousafzai and that it was going to be a canned story designed to play on your emotions, like the Coke or P&G commercials that come on during the Olympics.  So, image my delight when this book was absolutely none of those things.

This is a story about a survivalist, Mormon family living in Idaho that not only didn't educate their children, but didn't even get them birth certificates.  A story about harsh child abuse and neglect, the complexity of what love looks like in that environment, and the iron will of a girl determined to survive it.  The longing to belong, even to the dysfunctional, vengeful clan she grew up in was conveyed with such raw emotion that at times I gasped out loud when something unexpected happened.  

It is also a story about mental illness and the toll this takes on children being raised by parents with bi-polar disorder, paranoia, and unresolved childhood trauma.  The isolation of this family, who live near Ruby Ridge, waxed and waned, but the mistrust of government and anyone who did not believe as they did left lasting scars on the children that play out in a variety of ways.

The book is exceptionally well written.  I cannot overstate how well plotted it is and how vivid the tales and characters are.  The author's thinking errors are unusually pronounced, but she recounts them without self-pity or self-aggrandizement.  One thing it does particularly well is to remind us as teachers not to write off a student who appears unprepared for the task of high education.  

Spoiler alert: My favorite scene is when the author/narrator moved abroad at one point and she realizes that the reason her father is so freaked out by her leaving is less about his concern that a woman is getting an education and more about his worry that when The End of Days comes (with which he is obsessed and has spent his entire adult life preparing for), he will not be able to drive to get her.  He has enough gas stored that he could pick her up anywhere in North America and bring her home, but he wouldn't have a way to get her home from across the water.  My second favorite scene is her in class asking what the word Holocaust means because she had never heard it before, then going on to study Jewish history at Oxford just a few years later.

Highly recommend.
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Recommended by Nancy: I’m not an avid reader like you. I also mostly loved Educated by Tara Westover, but I suspect you have already read that, too. For better or worse I don’t invest time in mediocre books so I check reviews before I dive in
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