Educated: A Memoir

There is a moment in Educated, Tara Westover’s extraordinary memoir of growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge, when the author realizes she has been given two entirely different accounts of her own childhood, one from her family and one from documents and records. She cannot be certain which version is true. This epistemological crisis is the book’s central subject: what does it mean to know something? What do we owe to the stories we were given about ourselves?

Westover grew up in the mountains of Buck’s Peak, Idaho, the youngest child of a paranoid survivalist father who believed the End of Days was imminent and a mother who gradually became a faith healer and herbalist. She never attended school. She worked in her father’s junkyard. Several of her siblings suffered serious, untreated injuries. An older brother was violently abusive. Through a combination of self-directed learning and eventual enrollment at Brigham Young University, which she entered knowing almost nothing of formal education, she eventually made her way to Cambridge and then to Harvard.

The Question of Memory

Westover is admirably honest about the book’s central limitation: memory is unreliable, and her family disputes many of her accounts. She includes footnotes where her own recollections diverge from family members’. This methodological transparency is one of the book’s great strengths. Rather than pretending to objective truth, Westover writes with rigorous self-awareness about the subjective nature of her material. The result is a memoir that is also, in part, a meditation on the nature of memoir itself.

The writing is consistently excellent. Westover is not a stylist in the self-consciously literary sense, but she has a gift for concrete, precise description and for rendering emotional complexity without sentimentality. The scenes of violence are unflinching but not gratuitous; the love for her family, which never disappears, however much they harm and gaslight her, is rendered with real compassion and bewilderment.

Verdict

Educated is one of the most compelling memoirs of the past decade. It works simultaneously as a story of educational self-transformation, a study of family dysfunction and religious extremism, and a serious philosophical inquiry into how we know what we know. The central questions it raises, about self-invention, the violence of departing from one’s origins, the price of education, are not easily resolved, and the book does not pretend to resolve them. It is all the better for it.

Bibliographic Details

WritersReview is an independent publication. This review contains no paid placement. See our Editorial Policy.