EDUCATED: A MEMOIR
AUTHOR: TARA WESTOVER
NON-FICTION
RATING:
7.2 OUT OF 10
I found Tara’s story captivating and certainly unique. The book kept my attention throughout and does a great job allowing the reading to feel as though we intimately know every member of Tara’s family. I also found myself having an intense reaction of anger during a large portion of the book but eliciting actual emotion (even negative emotion) has to be the sign of a well written story so have to respect it. RECOMMEND.
THEMES
PARENTING | BIPOLAR DISORDER | MORMONISM | RELIGION | SMALL TOWN LIVING | EDUCATION | ENLIGHTENMENT | ABUSE
KNOWLEDGE FROM THE PAGE
First and foremost, Tara’s story is absolutely heartbreaking… even though it ends well (kind of). The level of mental, emotional and physically abuse, in the name of “The Lord”, that her family subjected her to is disgusting. Her story made me so angry in regard to a Father’s inability to see the long term damage that he is doing to his children due to his blind belief in (what he perceived to be) “doing the lords work”. Now, apparently, there was also undiagnosed mental illness, in the form Bi-Polar disorder, associated with his religious based abuse but that does not excuse the fact that her mother, family and community also turned a blind eye to the obvious negative impact that Tara’s father was having on her.
I think the takeaway here is that until we make a conscious decision to educate ourselves on the world outside of our limited perspective… our eyes will only see the version of the world that our parents and community show us. And this version is just that… limited. We have to realize that until we make the effort to expand our perspective, open up our eyes to the world and all of the beautiful cultures and people that are a part of it… only then are we able to take an honest inventory of our beliefs. We must experience what the world has to offer outside of our intimate circle and the echo chamber of rhetoric that we hear within this group. If we don’t, we can never fully understand what we believe regarding religion, morals, values and all of our ideologies… and essentially will only be coloring with half the crayons in the crayon box.
Some of my highlighted, underlined quotes from the book…
“The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
“I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.”
“All of our decisions that go into making a life – the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock.”
“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”
“The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you… she was just a cockney in a nice dress until she believed in herself, then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.” – Bob Marley
“It is painful to face reality. To realize there was something ugly, and I refused to see it.”
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to create one’s self.”