Educated – Book Review

Tara Westover

Title: Educated

Author: Tara Westover

Publisher: Penguin, 2018

Pages: 384

Price: INR 499

Tara Westover is just 34 years old and yet her memoir has a lot to offer, a lot more than many people much older would have. Hers was a difficult childhood, thanks primarily to her parents and also to one of her siblings. Even when she grew up into maturity, her family wouldn’t grant her the freedom to be herself. But she liberated herself from the family and thus found her own voice. It was a process of education, she says. Hence the title of the book.

Family is one of the many givens in our lives. We had no choice about our parents first of all. Then the siblings. We spend the most crucial part of our life, helpless infancy and childhood, with these people. Our parents and siblings form our personalities to a great extent well before we are able to know what is being done to us. Tara’s father was an orthodox Mormon who also, in all probability, suffered from a bipolar disorder. He imposed his religion with all its excesses on his family and thus prevented them from growing up into normal human beings.

Tara and three of her siblings did not even possess a birth certificate because her father did not trust any government machinery. He deprived the children of school for the same reason. He did not trust the medical system. All the children were consigned to the junkyard owned by their father and they slogged there with the metals and scraps facing serious threats to their lives. Many times they encountered serious dangers while scrapping. But Mr Westover never took any of the victims to a hospital. Instead, he entrusted them to his own wife who had managed to learn something about herbal medicines by experimenting with them. Fortunately, Mrs Westover knew enough about herbs to save lives that were in serious danger. Her clinic was called ‘God’s pharmacy’ by her husband who was absolutely certain that nobody but God could heal us holistically. After all, God knows what He is doing even when He gives us the injuries. We are his children. We should trust ourselves to Him. What else is faith?

Tara and two of her siblings manage to escape that miserable destiny by seeking education on their own. All the three went on to complete PhD too. Tara secured her doctorate from no less a university than the Cambridge with the help of a scholarship. The other four of her siblings remained good Mormons. Or morons, should I say?

No, I shouldn’t. Tara has written the book with all the sympathy and understanding she is capable of mustering when it comes to narrating her own and her family’s story. We shouldn’t be judgmental while reading this book. Instead, we should be perceptive. We are peeping into the lives of people who had serious psychological disorders (Tara’s father and one of her brothers with the pseudonym of Shawn) and their victims.

The book reads like a thriller. It is unputdownable. You are often likely to forget that you are reading a real-life story. You will surely wonder occasionally whether this is probable in real life. Mr Westover’s religious fervour borders on sheer insanity that can repulse any sane reader. Religion, taken beyond its simple ordinary practical uses, is an utter horror and this book shows how.

But this is not a book about Mormonism, the author assures us in the very first sentence of the book (Author’s Note). It is not. Mormonism is not discussed in the book though it finds mention again and again understandably. It appears as a formidably backward, regressive and occasionally ludicrous religion whose founders had too many wives among many other idiosyncrasies.

The book is about an individual’s struggle to be herself while longing to cling on to her beloved people. She wants very much to be part of her family but without losing her own identity. A time comes, however, when she has to make an either/or choice. The book is about what she chose and why and how the choice affected her.

It is possible that certain things mentioned in the book have been given colours by the author. That cannot be helped in any memoir. Every worthwhile hindsight is an attempt to reorganise the mess that the past was. In that process, certain colours will be added, certain meanings will alter, and even some realities will metamorphose. The past is not a rigid fossil; it is a fluid entity being shaped and reshaped again and again by each narrator. That is why the question whether all that is written in Educated is the real truth is invalid. There is no absolute truth when it comes to our lives. There are only truths we define and redefine as we move on with the pathetic affair called life. Some of Tara’s family members were upset with the book and understandably so. Their truths will be quite different from Tara’s about the same situations narrated in the book. They see from their perspectives, Tara from hers. Life’s truths are only perspectives. That is one reason why any religion’s claim to ultimate truth is ridiculous.

Tara’s book may read like high melodrama occasionally. But it is not. It is her perspective which, as I mentioned earlier, need to be looked at more with perspicacity than judgment. It is such perspicacity that makes us more like the gods. It is such perspicacity that books like this seek to develop in the reader.