Educated: a self-discovering read

Book author: Tara Westover

I have a fear about reading popular books. When Educated was being read by multiple friends in goodreads, I was doubting whether the fame of the book was authentic. Then I came across Bill Gates reading the book in a documentary. I follow Gates’ book recommendation religiously and when I saw him reading books and seeping his coke in a remote cabin surrounded by lakes and jungles, I was a little envious of what money can do—blissful reading in a scenic place. And I also took a note of the book’s title. Later in the office, when my colleague Jenny apu told me about this book, and I recollected how I saw Gates reading this book in a cool setting, Jenny apu told me, “Oh I saw him reading Educated in a beautiful cabin in the woods”. I jumped out of my chair! The stars are telling me to read it, so I read it.

Well, my fear about the popularity stuff was completely broken after I read a chapter or two. Tara Westover was born in rural Idaho to a set of parents who were Mormons. Buck’s Peak has been her home, her school, her workplace for seventeen years of her life. She tells us her stories—living in nature, working hard, living a life shaped by a father who is afraid that the end of the world is about to begin.

In the moments, Tara’s family was driving by Arizona to visit her grandmother, listening to the stories of Apache women, she could probably relate herself, how her life was no less in her own control than those women’s in theirs.

As we drove to the trailer, the sun dipping in the sky, its last ray reaching across the highway, I thought about the Apache women. Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by the women themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless as grains of sand, then into rock, until all was set in stone.

Tara’s father reminded me of the dads and husbands in my society who take it very seriously to cover their women, whose spiritualism is tied to the knot of the scarf their women must wear. Tara never went to public school like other children, so school allured her the most. When she could, she met her curiosity by enrolling in the dance lessons to get a sense of belonging like normal kids. But she kept it a secret to her dad, who thinks dancing as an act of whores.

Music played from a stereo in the piano and we began to dance, our feet tapping in sequence. Next we were supposed to leap, reach upward and spin. My feet remain planted. Instead of flinging my arms above my head, I lifted them only to my shoulders. When the other girls crouched to slap the stage, I tilted; when we were to cartwheel, I swayed, refusing to allow gravity to do its work, to draw the sweatshirt any higher up my legs.

The too-shy-to-lift-her-legs girl’s freedom would be fighting for rolled sleeves in the sun.

I wanted to obey. I meant to. But the afternoon was so hot, the breeze on my arms so welcome. It was just a few inches. I was covered from my temple to my toes in grime. It would take me half an hour that night to dig the black dirt out of my nostrils and ears. I didn’t feel much like an object of desire or temptation. I felt like a human forklift. How could an inch of skin matter?

This feeling of shame, or to be precise, the fear of feeling others' shame on her body would come back to her again and again.

On Thursday, after I’d finished scrapping, I drove forty miles to the nearest Walmart and bought a pair of women’s jeans and two shirts, both blue. When I put them on, I barely recognized my own body, the way it narrowed and curved. I took them off immediately, feeling that somehow they were immodest. They weren’t, not technically, but I knew why I wanted them—for my body, so it would be noticed—and that seemed immodest even if the clothes were not.

The urge to feel like normal kids, the urge to do the things other kids do—would fuel Tara. In her mind, she would imagine those things, but not so comfortably.

I Imagined Charles inviting me to his house, to play a game, or to watch a movie, and felt a rush of pleasure. But when I pictured Charles visiting Buck’s Peak, I felt something else, something like panic. What if he found the root cellar? What if he discovered the fuel tank?

Tara was a middle child of her seven or so siblings. All of them worked at their dad’s scrapping business one time or another of their lives. Early in the morning, they get up, go to the scrapyard to help dad, mom makes herbal medicines at home and midwives women across the hill. No school, very less tv, and lots of restrictions. Tara’s older brother Tyler was different from them. Tyler was soft-spoken, Tara would find him buried in books in the basement when the work hours were over.

“There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.”

Tyler does his trigonometry, refuses to help his dad so that he can concentrate on his study and ultimately enroll in a college. When Tyler leaves Buck’s Peak for college, for a future which would be written by him, not his father, Tara was left with dreaming the same about her. Or to submit to his dad’s decisions.

Tara’s life was also ruled by another elder brother—Shawn came to her life as a charismatic hero. Together they rode horses, discovered the mountains. And soon the other side of Shawn got exposed to Tara. The violent self in him. And after a terrible accident where Shawn sustained a head injury, the sympathized sister thought, how can she blame Shawn for his violent acts. Maybe it was not in his control.

Reflecting on it now, I’m not sure the injury changed him that much, but I convinced myself that it had, and that any cruelty on his part was entirely new. I can read my journals from this period and trace the evolution—of a young girl rewriting her history. In the reality she constructed for herself nothing had been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet. I wish I had my best friend back, she wrote. Before his injury, I never got hurt at all.

This would recur time and again as Tara would be indecisive was it her behavior that could make in difference in Shawn’s act

I begin to reason with myself, to doubt whether I had spoken clearly: what had I whispered and what had I screamed? I decide that if I had asked differently, been more calm, he would have stopped. I write this until I believe it, which doesn’t take long because I want to believe it. It’s comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power.

This last line gave me a tingle. How I used to prepare myself before calling my mother who can take my words and direct them in any way she wants. The ritual calls are so pathetic, out of duty as a daughter and like playing chess, what should I say or not say to minimize the hurt.

It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.

Like Tyler, Tara leaves the mountain, only to find herself in a constant fight to go back there. Because at seventeen, when she stepped into the school, it was designed for other seventeen years old, not for a first timer.

I barely had time to wonder what a blue book was before everyone produced one from their bags. The motion was fluid, synchronized, as if they had practiced it. I was the only dancer on the stage who seemed to have missed rehearsal.

The seventeen year old Tara falls again and again. To be used to girls wearing tank tops, students studying on a Sabbath day, cracking an art history class—it’s a lot. Raised by a father who refuses any help, Tara is oblivious to the idea of counseling.

Soon after, I found a pamphlet for the university counseling service on my desk. I barely looked at it, just knocked it into the trash. I could not see a counselor. To see one would be to ask for help, and I believed myself invincible. It was an elegant deception, a mental pirouette. The toe was not broken because it was not breakable. Only an X-ray could prove otherwise. Thus the X-ray would break my toe.

Soon her wallet gets thin.

Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars. I submitted my homework and studied for my exams, but I did so out of a terror—of losing my scholarship should my GPA fall a single decimal—not from real interest in my classes.

As much difficulty the school brought upon her, Tara found herself transformed slowly. She could not find herself comfortable with this new beginning, but also she began to be uncomfortable thinking about returning back home. To go back to the younger self she was. She needed money desperately to grow a new world for her as her former world is no longer an option to her. Finally Tara applied for a scholarship and was surprised upon receiving a check of 4000 dollars. She only needed 1400 to complete her root canal surgery. What would she do with so much money? She paid her rent, bought her study materials and was left with some money. Maybe she wouldn’t need to work for his father to earn the tuition expense.

I’d believed the money would be used to control me, but what it did was enable me to keep my word to myself: for the first time, when I said I would never again work for my father, I believed it.

Here’s a funny account from the book that seemed like a rendezvous.

I had never made my peace with it. As a girl I had often imagined myself in heaven, dressed in a white gown, standing in a pearly mist across from my husband. But when the camera zoomed out there were ten women standing behind us, wearing the same white dress. In my fantasy I was the first wife but I knew there was no guarantee of that; I might be hidden anywhere in the long chain of wives. For as long as I could remember, this image had been at the core of my idea of paradise: my husband, and his wives. There was a sting in this arithmetic: in knowing that in the divine calculus of heaven, one man could balance the equation for countless women.

The school graduate was no more just her father’s daughter. The education transforms Tara and she grows her own thoughts. Her own preferences, interests. The never-sat-in-a-classroom-before girl flies to study in Cambridge. Tara starts to spread her wings. She gets introduced to the life of the educated by her classmates.

Nic took us to the conservatory where he’d studied violin. It was in the heart of Rome and was richly furnished, with a grand staircase and resonant halls. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to study in such a place, to walk across marble floors each morning and, day after day, come to associate learning with beauty. But my imagination failed me. I could only imagine school as I was experiencing it now, as a kind of museum, a relic from someone else’s life.

University was different. And so were the peers, who are brought up in richness, adored by their parents. Once embarrassed to discuss her family and roots, Tara opens up to her friends by her newly found growth of mind.

I told them I’d been poor, I told them I’d been ignorant, and in telling them this I felt not the slightest prick of shame. Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: it wasn’t that I hadn’t studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn’t a diplomat. It wasn’t that Dad was half out of his mind, or that mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.

Education creates a gap between the daughter Tara and the new Tara.

I thought, and what sort of daughter prefers a teacher to her own father?

But although I wished it were otherwise, I did not want to go home. I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak. That feeling became a physical part of me, something I could taste on my tongue or smell on my own breath.

I could feel Tara being indecisive about going home to spend her vacation.

But I knew what unspoken pact I would be making as I walked through that door. I could have my mother’s love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.

Our dreams as children that our parents would finally, one day, come to understand us… or we would be so strong to neglect their conflicts, so strong to not get hurt by their hurtful remarks… oh that day-dream, oh that slightest hope… I feel you, Tara.

When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that life, I perceived him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. When he was before me, towering, indignant, I could not remember how, when I was young, his laugh used to shake his gut and make his glasses shine. In his stern presence, I could never recall the pleasant way his lips used to twitch, when a memory tugged tears from his eyes. I can only remember those things now, with a span of miles and years between us.

It is nice, the distance.

Educated is a book about living one’s life on the surface of stability, self-control, independence knowing that deep inside there is a volcano of family conflict that would erupt out from time to time. True respect for Tara. I found my voice echoed in her insecurities and I would like to see myself as courageous as she is!