“Educated" by Tara Westover

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Educated is one of my favorite books. I first read it shortly after its release date in 2018, but it has taken me three years to write about it. I suppose that’s because I’m still thinking about it, and figuring out what it means to me, and why.

It is a devastating story, but written beautifully. It hit a nerve for me in two main ways: first, in its portrayal of women and girls existing within religious communities; and secondly, the use of gaslighting and the author’s experience with truth, reality, and powerful men who lie.

While it is a story that contains pain, there is also not only hope, but nuance: Westover escapes the pre-destined future her birth, gender and circumstances had planned for her—this is a heroic feminist tale—but it is no fairytale. She did what she had to do at great personal cost, and she doesn’t shy away from the intense internal struggle and turmoil that comes from breaking away from one’s very bloodline, whether that break be idealogical, emotional, physical or financial. In her case it required all four.

***

As a quick summary, Tara Westover was born at home in the mountains of Idaho in 1986. She is one of seven children to parents who didn’t believe in many things but did believe fervently in some: herbs, essential oils, a literal reading of the Bible and the Days of Abomination, to name a few. They were preppers, canning peaches and stockpiling fuel, always planning for when their “persecution” would come to a head. The things they did not believe in included doctors and modern medicine, public education, the government, regulations of any kind, etc. She was issued a Delayed Birth Certificate at age nine because she was born at home, had never seen a doctor, had never been registered for school, etc. Pretty much any type of institutional norm was suspect. Her father was convinced that she would become corrupted if she were to attend public school, so her education was:

“in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.” (p xii)

Those words are beautiful, no? The fact that they were written by someone that did not get any sort of formalized education until the age of 17 is pretty astounding. She taught herself enough to pass the ACT (again, having never gone to elementary, middle or high school) and got accepted to Brigham Young University. She went on to Cambridge and then Harvard.

But before she attended such prestigious universities, she suffered. Her childhood was rife with abuse and danger at the hands of her father and older brother, and by proxy, her mother, who did not intervene. Her father put her in physical harms way often, forcing her to work in their junkyard without proper gear or safety precautions and driving recklessly through tumultuous weather without seat belts, resulting in serious car accidents. Her brother punched her, choked her, dragged her by her hair, stuck her head in the toilet, folded her wrist back against itself. He called her terrible names, among them a whore and the n-word. He threatened to kill her. He lied about his actions to protect himself, and he cast doubt on her memory and accounts, in turn rendering her unable to discern truth from lies, fantasy from reality, unable to listen to and trust herself. And because she had been denied an education by her father, she couldn’t push back.

“Once, when I was fifteen, after I’d started wearing mascara and lip gloss, Shawn had told Dad that he’d heard rumors about me in town, that I had a reputation. Immediately Dad thought I was pregnant…I sat on my bed, knees pressed to my chest, and listened to them shout. Was I pregnant? I wasn’t sure. I considered every interaction I’d had with a boy, every glance, every touch. I walked to the mirror and raised my shirt, then ran my fingers across my abdomen, examining it inch by inch and thought, Maybe.

I had never kissed a boy.

I had witnessed birth, but I’d been given none of the facts of conception. While my father and my brother shouted, ignorance kept me silent: I couldn’t defend myself, because I didn't understand the accusation.” (p199)

Despite the horrific nature of the physical abuse she endured, it was the mental abuse and manipulation that was most destructive—even after she escaped their physical presence, the psychological scars still haunted her and pulled at her. Her father and her oldest brother had groomed her and convinced her that she (and all women) could not be trusted, that they belonged only and always “in the home,” that they were not intelligent, capable or worthy. That they must submit and follow the men in their lives, without question. The men said certain things happened that didn’t, and vice versa, just repeating lies over and over so that they would become truth by sheer persistence. This sent her, understandably, into a spiral. For a long time, she didn’t even know that the environment that she lived in was toxic, it was just the way things were. Even after she had left, home and family had a strong grip on her. And why wouldn’t they? Those are some of the most formative things in our lives, for better or for worse.

And yet, incredibly, she is still charitable and compassionate in her portrayal of her family. She still loves them, despite the dysfunction and danger that comes with some of them. She grants them, over and over, the complexity of their humanity. On the very last page in ‘a note on the text’ section, she writes:

“We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories. Nothing has revealed that truth to me more than writing this memoir—trying to pin down the people I love on paper, to capture the whole meaning of them in a few words, which is of course impossible. This is the best I can do: to tell that other story next to the one I remember. Of a summer day, a fire, the scent of charred flesh, and a father helping his son down the mountain.” (p 334)

***

This is the story of one woman’s experience growing up in the mountains of Idaho in the 80’s and 90’s. It is also, paradoxically, so much broader and more specific than that. It is the story of being a woman in a man’s world but within the context of a religious setting. Westover’s experience contained overt and severe abuse and manipulation that stemmed from a male dominated, religious driven environment. And though I never had my head shoved into a toilet, I saw myself in her story, over and over again. It resonated so, so deeply with me. Why is that?

In overly simplistic terms, two things: religion and lies.

I also was raised in a church culture, one that did not allow for women to be pastors/leaders or to preach on Sunday mornings. She could speak to an all women crowd, but not to men. Men did not take instruction from women, but rather women were to submit to men. This is still the case today, as far as I know. In the very fabric of the the church culture was the idea that women must defer to men, always; that she be his helper, but never his leader.

With this as a backdrop, it is not surprising that, growing up, I absorbed from the church that my body itself was inherently a problem, a potential “stumbling block” for boys and men, and thus, I needed to cover it up to stop them from sinning. The onus was placed on women and girls to prevent men from lusting after us and “undressing us with their eyes.” We were told our shorts needed to split the knee. We were, at times, made to kneel on the ground to make sure our itchy, plaid skirts touched the floor at school. We were not allowed to wear purses or bags across our chests, because it accentuated our breasts too much. Bikinis and spaghetti straps were cause for concern for our very souls if they were worn. Sex was absolutely out of the question; that is, until you were married. It was understood that sex was dirty and wrong, but on the night of your wedding, it suddenly turned into a blissful euphoria (this ideology helps explain why so many people in church cultures get married very young.) So on the one hand, we were temptresses and whores, and on the other, as soon as we became wives, we were to become sexual goddesses whose main purpose in life was to sexually satisfy our husbands so they didn’t cheat on us, and to pop out baby after baby. I was never called a whore, but I knew that I could absolutely become one if I wasn’t careful, pure, deferential, compliant. I knew that my body had the potential to be dangerous. It was something to be wary of. It was to be feared and thus tamed, lest it be the source of men’s destruction.

All of the responsibility falls on the women, while all of the focus is centered on the man. What does he want? What does he need? She enters the picture either as a sexual object to fulfill his desires, or a sexual distraction who will cause his downfall. Her wants, her needs, her concerns, her fears, and her desires, are never considered.

To that end, my body—all the female bodies—were heavily policed. The body itself, how we moved it, and what we put on it were all scrutinized. What I gleaned from all this was that my body was a problem, thus my existence was, too. This was, obviously, never explicitly said—instead our compliance, our subjugation, was couched in spiritual language intended to applaud us for our service: “What a gift it was to have the opportunity to serve our husbands and glorify God with our bodies!” And I believed it. To this day I catch myself wondering if I am being “too much” or inappropriate if I wear a crop top or show any cleavage. The impulse to make myself small, invisible, and manageable feels baked into me.

I didn’t undergo anything outright traumatic in my childhood, as Westover did repeatedly, but again, her story felt almost eerily close. The specifics don’t match, but the overall ethos felt like home. First and foremost, I knew the language of religion. The way Scripture was used to justify terrible actions and ideas. The words “blessed” and “righteous,” “testify” and “calling.” I recognized the worldview, the lack of nuance, the shame, the judgement cloaked in concern. I knew the ironic distrust of everything “other” and the ironclad, unquestioning trust of what and where she happened to be born into. I recognized the dogged certainty, the stark categorizations of black and white, good and bad. I recognized the inability to say: I might be wrong. I recognized the deep lack of curiosity.

And this is what an education can give us—the wherewithal, the freedom, the joy to be able to sometimes say: I don’t know.

And now, the lies.

In a chilling part of the book, Westover describes how her brother verbally threatened their sister’s life, how she took his threat to their father and mother seeking help, and how her parents rebuffed and doubted her account, but defended her brother almost instantly. When her brother heard that she had gone to their parents, he then threatened her life with a knife, to which her mother said that “he wasn’t serious about that.” (p 291) When her brother cut her off, her parents said he was justified because she was being “hysterical.”

“Reality became fluid. The ground gave way beneath my feet, dragging me downward, spinning fast, like sand rushing through hole in the bottom of the universe. The next time we spoke, Mother told me that the knife had never been meant as a threat. “Shawn was trying to make you more comfortable,” she said. “He knew you’d be scared if he were holding a knife, so he gave it to you.” A week later she said there had never been any knife at all.” (p 292)

Westover literally lost touch with reality after this episode. When those she trusted and loved questioned her lived experiences as if they were completely fabricated, when they twisted, distorted, and outright erased facts, it broke her.

I won’t dwell too much on this, because frankly, I’m still living in and processing what feels like a warped reality after the chaos and trauma of the 2016 election and the years that followed, crescendoing in the 2020 election and ultimately, January 6, 2021. But in reading and re-reading and thinking about this part of the book, I can’t help but compare her experience to mine in broad sweeps. It is impossible not to see how arrogant, incurious, and influential men in positions of power can shape the narrative, ideas, rhetoric, and even actions of those around them. It is impossible not to see the deaths that are born from it.

***

What is strange and difficult and confusing about all this is that I loved my childhood that centered largely around our life in the church. I grew up playing sports and roaming my neighborhood on sticky summer days, bored but blissful, though I didn’t know it at the time. I have, overall, very fond memories of my life at home with my equally large family, of my adolescence and high school years spent at the school ran through the church. I even think that my family was one of the more progressive ones in the church in some ways. I remember my dad telling me I could and should be a senator, that I should apply to the Naval Academy. Further, some of my lifelong friendships were born out of my life in the church. It’s not as if I look back on my time in the church as wholly horrible, quite the opposite. I think I loved the church. But it wasn’t until much later on that I realized that I didn’t really know the church. It was only once I left that I began to see the cracks and discrepancies, which have only gotten larger with time, lived experiences, and, of course, an education. And while I don’t consider myself religious anymore, I do consider myself a person of faith.

I have spent the last decade attempting to pull apart the threads, keeping what feels whole and real and good, and discarding that which does not. I am still pulling and threading and generally making a mess of it, but I no longer crave certainty, and I am no longer terrified of being a disruption, of making good trouble, and that feels like God. I may have found Her in the grey areas and, delightfully, in myself, right where I was told to never look.