Redheaded Reviews: Education: A Memoir by Tara Westover

Tara grew up in the mountains of Idaho as a Mormon, the youngest of many children to a father who owned a scrap yard and was manic depressive and a mother who was a midwife and sold herbal remedies. Her father was a survivalist who constantly believed that the End was near so they stockpiled food and weapons and gas. They were pure Mormons and followed the laws on the dress, food, drink, and not working on the Sabbath, etc... so her dad believed that they had been chosen for special treatment. They didn't believe in schooling, hospitals, doctors, or the government.

When her dad got depressed, they headed to Arizona to visit his parents who spent the winter there. The family believed that the sun would lift his spirits. It seemed to and after a few days, he was ready to go back to work. However, he wanted to leave that evening rather than first thing in the morning when everyone would be fresh and the twelve-hour ride would result in an accident when Tara's older brother Tyler fell asleep at the wheel and drifted off the road and plowed into a tractor. Their mother was damaged badly as the front end of the car had pushed inward toward her. For the next three months, she would spend most of it in the basement and her memory would never be the same again. About two years later the same thing would happen only in a van. Dad would be driving in an ice storm that he refused to stop for, in fact, had sped up for, and wound up flipping the van on the side of the road.

Then therre\s Shawn, her older brother who sometimes looks after her like he did with the Shearer, an evil machine that destroys iron and can take off your arm or your head in the process. He refused to let her use that machine as long as she held it down for him to keep it from rearing up and hurting him. But she had to also bring him glasses of water with ice, then without ice, then something else to drink because that wasn't what he wanted to drink. Shawn is an abuser. If she goes against him then she gets her head put in the toilet and then her hand stretched back to the point of breaking it. He has a string of girlfriends he abuses.

Tyler gets out and goes to BYU and gives Tara the idea of going to college. With Tyler's help, she manages it and gets accepted to BYU herself. But once there she realizes all she doesn't know. Like the Holocaust. Or really anything about history. At first, she stays by herself, but eventually, she learns to branch out and makes friends.

This was an intriguing book in that you don't often come across stories of people who had not been educated get into college and go farther than that. And the abuse she suffered from her brother and father is horrendous. To overcome those odds stacked against you is indeed incredible. Her story is fascinating and as one who comes from a family of manic depressives I can sympathize. The writings not bad but could be better. I can't explain it but it's just a feeling I have about the reading. So I give this book four out of five stars.

Quotes

This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first, I merely believed that until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself without lying, that it didn\t affect me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsesseing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me: that was its effect.

-Tara Westover (Education p 111)

“I’ve been praying anout your decision to go to college. The Lord has called me to testify. He is displeased. You have caset aside His blessijngs to nwhore after man\s knowledge. His wrathis stirred against you. It will not be long in coming.” I don’t remember my father standing to leave but he must have, while I sdat gripped by fear. God’s wrath had laid wast to cities it had flooded the whole earth. I felt weak, then wholly powerless. I remembered that my life was not mine. I could be taken out of my body at any moment, dragged heavenwar to reckon with a furious Father. The next morning I found Mother mixing oils in the kitchen. “I\ve decided not to go to BYU,” I said. “Don’t say that. I don’t want to hear that. Of all my children you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze. I didn’t expect it from Tyler—that was a suprise00butg you. Don’t you stay. Go. Don’t let anything stop you from going.”

-Tara Westover (Education p 133-4)

I noticed. though, when he came home for Christmas that he waws reading a book called Les Miserables, and I decided that it must be the kind of book a college student reads. I bought my own copy, hoping it would teach me about history or literature, but it didn’t. It couldn’t, because I was unable to distinguiush between the fictional story and the historical backdrop. Napoleon felt no more real to me than Jean Valjean. I had never heard of either.

-Tara Westover (Education p 150)

Dad would have said I was broker than the Ten Commandments.\

-Tara Westover (Education p 167)

To admit uncertainty is to admist to weakneesss, topowerlesssnesss, and to believer in yourself despite both. It is a fraility, but in this frailty there is a strength; the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.

-Tara Westover (Education p 197)

It’s strange how you give people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journeal. But Shawn had more poweree over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.

-Tara Westover (Education p 199)

I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness.

-Tara Westover (Education p 240)

Mother had grown tired of the lecture, and I askded Dad to talk about something else. “But the world is about to end!” he said. He was shouting now. “Of courst it is,” Mother said. “But let’s not discuss it over dinner.”

-Tara Westover (Education p 248)

[John Stuart] Mill claimed that women have been coazed, cajoled, shoved, and squashjed into a series of femine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.

-Tara Westover (Education p 259)

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies.

-Tara Westover (Education p 301)

The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter hwo obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you.

-Tara Westover (Education p 307)