Slightly Literate
Happy New Year everybody. I think these kickers are here to stay — going to be calling all my half-assed book reviews “Slightly Literate” from now on. This is book review number two.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have completed a thing. This book, Educated by Tara Westover.
Where to start? Well, for one, I haven’t read a memoir in over two years. There were a couple in high school I read and enjoyed for AP Lang, but for rather stupid reasons I’m unable to call them a favorite genre. They are always emotional rollercoasters I rarely have the temperament to consume objectively. Same goes for this one.
Educated reads a lot like The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. I’m quite familiar with the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, but nevertheless once I started reading I was quite surprised that Westover chose this particular title and cover photo. A good portion of this memoir is not (directly at least) about her education. Almost none of it is a reflection on the American school system, which for some reason was what I was expecting. (This is maybe because I saw my 11th grade English teacher reading this back in 2018 and automatically assumed it was about teaching. It’s not.)
I didn’t even know these existed, but apparently there are a group of people Westover labels “survivalists” that live completely isolated for most governmental and medical institutions, such as hospitals and schools. Westover’s story starts there, on a remote mountain called Buck’s Peak in Idaho. Her father owns a junkyard and scraps metal every day, and her mother is a dutiful Mormon housewife who begins to learn how to midwife by chapter 2. (Midwifery without a professional license is, by the way, illegal in several states in the U.S.) Her six older brothers and sisters live together in their house on the mountain, occassionally “doing homeschool”. Her family distrusts the government with a fervor, and as such Westover is secluded from society for a good majority of her childhood.
Westover notes in the beginning of the book that her story, although deeply intertwined with Mormonism, is not a reflection of the religion itself. I want to make sure I mention that here because I had some confusion trying to reconcile this statement with the story that followed. I didn’t think it unreasonable that Westover have an opinion on Mormonism and how it had affected her life, but I did find it difficult to not develop my own based on what I had read.
Similarly, I often found myself passing harsher judgement on her family, which was indeed fraught with complication and complexity, than Westover did herself. I didn’t see this as an attempt on Westover’s part to paint herself in a kinder light; rather, I felt that it was a constant struggle for her to even decide how she felt about her family. This is understandable — after all, we make a lot of exceptions for the people we love.
A formal education is what Westover says triggered her growth and allowed her to become who she is today. A big part of this for her is expanding her worldview and allowing her to analyze the words she had taken as gospel in her childhood. But I think an equally important part of her journey was the people she met along the way. While they didn’t teach her about historical events and philosophy, they showed her the different walks of life. Something incredibly unique about this whole memoir, though, is how alone I feel that Westover portrays that she is throughout. She mentions “friends” in passing, but only touches a few certain people by name outside of her family, and even then doesn’t characterize them as much more than people who are different from her. Some of them understand her struggles, but only she can live them. I still don’t know exactly what this means, but I don’t think it’s meant to discredit any contribution they had in her life. In the Acknowledgements Westover clearly calls out several people from her story, thanking them for their help throughout her life and while writing the memoir. I have many hypotheses, but none I feel confident in enough to state above the others.
Something notable I came to realize about memoirs after reading Educated is that they are often not 100% historically accurate accounts of the author’s life. They’re stories, and there’s a storyline that demands to be followed. Westover’s memoir is, for example, pieced together by her journals and memories, with help from some of her siblings. You’d think with the written evidence that the story would be quite clear cut, but Westover readily acknowledges her role as a biased narrator. In fact, I’ve never really felt an author’s need to discredit themselves so often more than in Educated, but I think the decision was especially wise on Westover’s part. She often includes footnotes noting that paraphrasing was made, or that certain events may have occurred differently according to others’ accounts. According to her, those misremembered events might have made all the difference in how readers would paint the image of her family, and while I don’t necessarily agree on some occassions, I do believe that they were powerful reminders to stop and reflect throughout the memoir.
And so yet again we reach the end of a review without a clear message other than that I enjoyed it. Thoroughly. But…I will be taking a short break from emotional rollercoasters for an undetermined amount of time. I’ll be attempting to fix my sleep schedule now through Why We Sleep: I hope the guilt-tripping is powerful enough to wean off the bad habits. Farewell for now :)
