Educated by Tara Westover

The following is a review I put at Goodreads for a non-fiction work, a memoir from a young lady, Tara Westover, simply called Educated.  This memoir details her efforts to get an education.  She grew up in a remote area of Idaho under a father who was skeptical of government, refused to cooperate with it whenever he could, and therefore did not send his children to school.  Tara was really not home school either except for some basics.  The first time she stepped into a classroom was in college at Brigham Young University.  Ultimately Tara earned a PhD in history from Cambridge University in England.  So from this lack of early education, from a totally remote and self-sufficient family, a father who may have been paranoid and bi-polar, and an older brother who physically abused her, Tara fashions a memoir.  To make sense of my first sentence of the Goodreads review, you’ll have to realize I gave the book three stars.  You can only give whole stars at Goodreads, up to five, but many get precise with their rating by articulating a half star in the review.   

This is not the type of book I would normally read.  And I never did provide an ongoing commentary or analysis here on my blog.  I read this book because I joined a book club where I work and these are the types of books they read apparently.  I thought joining this book club would expand my reading selection, and I’m glad I read this book.  While my rating was not high, I did enjoy reading about Tara.  You might enjoy read this too.

 

Goodreads Review:

If I could be more precise, I would give it two and a half stars, but I rounded up because ultimately I liked Tara and realized that her achievement was extraordinary.  Until the end I was going to round down. 

She not only graduated college (Brigham Young), not only earned a Master’s degree from Cambridge University (in England), but also earned a PhD from Cambridge.  Is that remarkable enough to have a memoir over it?  Perhaps when you consider she never had any education until she first stepped into a University class at Brigham Young.  Except for some scattered lessons from her mother, Tara Westover went from zero education to a PhD.  

Is this still interesting enough to have a memoir over it?  Probably not.  Tara’s memoir is focused on why she had no education until seventeen years old.  Tara grew up in a family that refused cooperating with the modern world, refused modern medicine, and lived in complete self-sufficiency in the mountains of Idaho.  She grew up in an extreme, large Mormon family (five brothers and a sister) with a father who according to Tara was bi-polar and isolated the family from the contemporary society.  This is the premise of her memoir. 

So why only two and a half stars?  Two reasons.  First, it didn’t feel honest.  Not that she was lying, but it didn’t feel like the entire truth was delineated.  It seemed there were a glossing over facts here, an exaggerating facts there, all in order to create more of a story.  For instance, how could the abuse (physical not sexual) from her older brother Shawn go undetected within the family?  Or perhaps the truth was too raw (this was published when she was thirty-two, and so in her recent past) to present honestly.  

Second, I didn’t feel the book was well written, and I think that’s more of an indictment than the first reason.  I don’t mean to say her prose was poor.  It was adequate without much of a sparkle.  The writing was poor because she failed to connect the various motifs and themes that played a part in her story.  She jumped from one issue to another.  It starts off about a father who is supposedly bi-polar (and frankly she never convinces me that he is) and it turns on the abuse of an older brother, all of which denied her an education growing up.  What was the relationship between these themes?  How did her religion play a role in this?  Why do half her siblings side with her parents?  Why are their developments different from hers, even though they lived in the same household?  I was left with more questions than answers.  Westover needed to show the interconnectedness of the various threads for a unified whole. 

Frankly I don't think she really thought the book through.  At least not well enough.  It seems like a hodgepodge of things that roll into her life.  I know the book is non-fiction, and so she feels compelled to stick to a time sequence of events, but there are all sorts of things she could have organized around and what she could have included.  And though I know she loves her family, I think she says so, we hardly ever see why she loves her family.  She gives one deleterious event after another.  That she loves her family is I assume a given assumption.  But this family is so different, and their impact on her life so catastrophic, that is not an assumption she should have made.  She needed to show us why she loves them.  And if her father really is bi-polar, wouldn't that require some sense of compassion for him?  We never see any of that. 

Still, Tara is a wonderful young lady who overcame a lot.