“Educated” by Tara Westover

This is a memoir of Westover’s journey from an eccentric upbringing homeschooled in rural Idaho, to college at BYU, a fellowship at Harvard, and a PhD from Cambridge. Westover begins by claiming her “story is not about Mormonism.” But a reader cannot help seeing her entire life through the lens of a family controlled by a father with his views of faith, extreme even by traditional Mormon standards. “Dad worries that the Government will force us to go [to school] but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us…. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or a nurse. We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom…. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.” Westover remembers vividly her father’s continual preparations for the Y2K computer bug and then the minutes just after midnight on January 1, 2000. “I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark. But God withheld the flood.”

Reflecting back, Westover also views much of her childhood with nostalgia, particularly the mountains that surrounded her home. “There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s tranquility born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence.” It takes Westover’s leaving home for college for her to realize the immense pull her father, her family, and her faith have on her. “My loyalty to my father had increased in proportion to the miles between us. On the mountain, I could rebel. But here, in this loud, bright place, surrounded by gentiles disguised as saints, I clung to every truth, every doctrine he had given me.” It takes a special kind of piousness to see Provo, Utah as the pits of Hell.

It costs Westover a lot to gain her education and break from her family’s traditions. “Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind.” It is a struggle that the reader senses is not just in her past, but is present as she writes her memoir still. “The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter. I am a traitor, a wolf among sheep; there is something different about me and that difference is not good.” She has become everything her father had preached against. “But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.” Westover realizes that the self she has created and chosen for herself is not one that her father will ever be able to accept into his family. In the end, she feels compelled to choose her own truths over her father’s. “Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”