Book Review: Educated

Tara Westover’s memoir Educated tells the gripping story of her impoverished childhood in southeastern Idaho, raised by fundamentalist parents who kept her from school and medical care because of their fears about government intrusion in their lives. The youngest of seven children, Tara spends her childhood working for her father in his salvage and construction business and helping her mother create herbal remedies. She suffers from the social isolation brought on by her parents’ extreme views, an abusive older brother, and the physical difficulties of a life spent doing dangerous work without proper safety procedures or medical attention. However, Tara gets accepted to BYU at seventeen, and after leaving home learns how to live, and thrive, on her own at college—and eventually rises all the way to earning a PhD from Cambridge.

Although this book is filled with harrowing stories of injuries treated at home with herbs and incredible anecdotes about Tara’s extreme ignorance when she arrived at college, what really kept me reading was her ability to clearly articulate the universal struggle every human must go through in order to become truly educated. This is not a memoir about fundamentalism or family abuse, or even easy lessons about ‘overcoming trials’—it is the messy story of what it takes to truly mature, even when it means leaving behind the things we thought were core to our identity. (It’s also not a memoir about Mormons, as she acknowledges in the beginning of the book—many of the good people who reach out to her and help her along her way are Mormon, and it is clear that her family are considered outliers in their community).

This book reminded me of one of my favorite passages from Adam Miller’s Letters to a Young Mormon. Miller writes a lot about the stories we tell ourselves, and he describes sin as the moment in which we privilege the story we are telling to ourselves and about ourselves over truth: “like most people, you’ll lavish attention on this story until, almost unwittingly it becomes your blueprint for how things ought to be. As you persist in measuring life against it, this Franken-bible of the self will become a substitute for God, an idol.” Similarly, as Tara moves away from her family and learns more about the world, she realizes that most of her new knowledge clashes with the self she had built as her father’s daughter. Which story will she choose, and who will she be?

Ultimately, Westover concludes that the process of becoming educated is the process of building a new self. Reading this book made me reflect on whether or not I am working to become truly educated in this sense. Do I read and learn simply to accumulate facts about the world or to gain power over others—or am I ready to forge a new self out the knowledge that I gain? Westover’s book is, like life, sometimes messy and painful, but reading it is a journey worth taking because you will be changed when you reach the end.