Educated

There is a difference between history and truth. There is a difference between being a woman and being a good daughter. There's a difference between mental health and being right and even doing right. Most painfully the decisions we make for ourselves for growth, and exploration, and purpose can hurt and ostracize the people and place that used to matter a lot to us.

Tara grows up in a Mormon family distrustful of the government and all institutions. Living in a stockpile-filled house near the top of a mount known as Buck's Peak (the "Princess"): both a treacherous swath of nature and a sign of home

"On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping"

Both in terms of seasons and education, "Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of day, the cycle of seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all." (xii) This is echoed shortly after: "What was happening now had happened before. This was the second serving of mother and daughter. The tape was playing in a loop." (30)

Tara Westover has an incredible way with words. This is even more incredible given her lack of ability to even string sentences together in writing until she's about 16.

"All of my father's stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how I'd know when it was time to come home."

The story of her childhood is largely a story of her father. "Dad and his mother...were tethered by their devotion to the mountain...Grandma's daughters had married and moved away, but my father stayed, building a shabby yellow house, which he would never quite finish." (4)

"Dad said public school was a ploy by the Government to lead children away from God." (5)

A theme throughout the book is questioning what it means to be a women. There are hints at this struggle even very early on, "Mother did her makeup every morning, but if she didn't have time she'd apologize all day, as if by not doing it , she had inconvenienced everyone." (14) She becomes a Midwife. "Midwifery had been Dad's idea, on of his schemes for self-reliance. There was nothing he hated more than our being dependent on the Government" (15). She became exceedingly successful in this capacity. "This was the first time in her life that she was, without question or caveat, the one in charge...She stopped wearing makeup, then she stopped apologizing for not wearing it." (17)

In spite of her mother's lack of education and extremist beliefs, she's powerful, manipulative, and loving

We learn that she actually came from a more traditional Mormon life, but was swept up by Tara's father. "Thinking how lucky Mother is to have escaped a world where there was an important difference between white and cream, and where such questions might consume a perfectly good morning, a morning that might otherwise be spent plundering Dad's junkyard with Luke's goat." (26)

As Tara ages, "I thought about my body, all the ways it had changed. I hardly knew what I felt toward it: sometimes I did want it to be noticed, to be admired, but then afterward I'd think of Jeanette Barney, and I'd feel disgusted." (118)

We start to uncover more of the strange ways in which this family operates. "Until Mother decided to get my birth certificate, not knowing my birthday had never seemed strange...It felt oddly dispossessing, being handed this first legal proof of my personhood: until that moment, it had never occurred to me that proof was required." (20)

We then are thrown through stories of how the family's tendencies are utterly destructive. The small decisions and thoughts form something far more dangerous and far more differentiated.

"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." (40)

Slowly, Tara plays around with self-education. It presents prospects of growth and stability which she lacked in her current life.

From BYU "white massifs jutted mightily out of the earth. They were beautiful, but to me their beauty seemed aggressive, menacing" (153). She is woefully underprepared and extremely different from the other (primarily Mormon) students. "I might have resented my upbringing but I didn't. My loyalty to my father had increased in proportion to the miles between us. On the mountain, I could rebel. But here, in this loud, bright place, surrounded by gentiles disguised as saints, I clung to every truth, every doctrine he had given me." (156)

There are signs of support from her family in spite of her going against their wishes. From her dad: "We'll figure it out. Just be happy, okay?" (165)

"I continued to study until two or three A.M. each night, believing it was the price I had to pay to earn God's support." (166)

Education leads to a few painful realizations. She learns of the holocaust and of slavery and racism. She learns further that her family perpetuates these biases. In response to Emmett Till, "My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew. The calculation was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts—the fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother's face." (179)

Being involved with other people (classmates, professors, boyfriends) bring in much needed perspectives which shed light on her tendencies. "Charles said my behavior was self-destructive, that I had an almost pathological inability to ask for help." (185) "If someone had asked me, I'd have said Charles was the most important thing in the world to me. But he wasn't. And I would prove it to him. What was important to me wasn't love or friendship, but my ability to lie convincingly to myself: to believe I was strong." (189)

As she continues to learn about white supremacy and history of the US, many of the things her dad told her growing up which she took to be truths were turned on their heads. "Dad always put faith before safety...Why did you terrify us like that? Why did you fight so hard against made-up monsters, but do nothing about the monsters in your own house?" (211) She's starting to see some of the pain is not her own doing.

Her father is severely burned by an explosion while scrapping cars. "This was the Lord's pain, he said, and he would feel every part of it." (222)

Tara still struggles to share her past with the people around her. She sees Shawn's wife falling into the same trap of abuse that she did.

Goes to Cambridge via a BYU program. "It seemed that Dr. Kerry saw in me the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in a library; I belonged in a crane." (237) Imposter syndrome.

Tara decides to study historiography. "What a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others...Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality." (238)

As she starts to taste academic success: "I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it. I wanted the professor to shout at me, wanted it so deeply I felt dizzy from the deprivation." (240) Persistent uphill battle against anything she's ever known. "I didn't know why I couldn't tell them. I just couldn't stand the thought of people patting me on the back, telling me how impressive I was I didn't want to be Horatio Alger in someone's tear-filled homage to the American dream. I wanted my life to make sense, and nothing in that narrative made sense to me." (249)