Educated

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”

No matter how hard I try, I seem to find myself picking up books about trauma over and over and over again... often without even realizing what I am getting myself into.  I picked up the highly-anticipated memoir Educated by Tara Westover without knowing much about it, except that it was getting a lot of press. Reading the blurb, I was intrigued, especially given the micro-review from JD Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, which stated that Educated was about a forgotten corner of America, or something like that (I can't find the exact quote.) I enjoyed Hillbilly Elegy (not without criticism, of course) so I was excited to dive in and listen to Educated, and expected something along those lines - personal memoir intertwined with sociological/psychological analysis.

Well. Vance could not be more wrong. Let's start with what Educated ISN'T - it's not about forgotten communities, left behind in economic advancement. It's not about conservative religious communities with strong boundaries so as to keep their values and way of life intact. It's not about a girl learning how to learn, overcoming the "odds" or pulling herself by her bootstraps (instead of odds and bootstraps, let's call it what it is - systems of privilege) or even really a "coming of age" saga.

Educated is the story of how a young woman painfully escapes the abusive and controlling environment of her family home, and grows into a strong, resilient, wise woman. Yes - what Westover describes is nothing less than abuse. Isolation, neglect of many kinds, intentional and active exposure to risk and harm, failure to protect, emotional and physical abuse. The list of what she has experienced is truly astounding - and like in many abusive relationships, the more freedom and distance she gained, the more the dangerous her time at home. Educated is also about the danger of isolation and religious extremism, and unchecked mental illness. This is not a family who has fallen off the beaten path - this is a family literally lost in the woods. And this is about how Westover fought to find her way back, and not just to mainstream society, but the upper echelons of the white towers her parents railed against, while coming to terms with how to be in relationship to a family so very opposed to who she becomes.

I highly recommend this memoir - Westover is an excellent writer, and portrays her family with love and respect, even as she details the horrors they visited upon her. She's also clearly an extraordinary human, with resilience and grit and grace worth admiring.

5/5 Stars.

PS... a plug for the audiobook, read by Julia Whelan, who is truly talented at bringing distinct life to different character's voices without making them caricatures.