Educated is a story of Westover's relationship with her family and how she got educated. This memoir is about the relationship that became tumultuous. It is also about stories that families create for their own. Who they call 'own'? Very basic instincts of people and a nation. It is also about an education people enable for other people. The scenes in the story have been vividly written even when she uses other people's memory to write them. I like that she addresses the scenes with gaps — When Shawn falls, when the confrontation happens, when they are in accident. Sometimes the way to address a gap staring at your own story is not to include only your own version of it. It's also to include how others see the gap.
That person or that likeness of one, had belonged. I was of that mountain that made me. It was only as I grew older that I wondered if how I had started is how I would end — if the first shape a person takes is their only true shape.
Memory is a book — you can read it, go back to it, read others' version of your memory, read their memory, update your version, but eventually you have got to pick up the book. Tara Westover tells the story of she went on to study in a university and later earn her PhD, without ever studying in a school. Her family lived in a mountain, worked as a self sufficient unit on a junkyard, with her mother as a caregiver and a healer. When they got injured, her mother more than adapted to the occasion. They did not believe in modern medicine or in the modern school system. Tara Westover was never vaccinated until she got herself done in a university. I have never thought of education to be like this — that people can think of it as indoctrination & a sham, that people can frame their own realities about Holocaust or 9/11, that mental health can look so toxic and can go unnoticed for so many years, that people would rather be roasted in fires rather than challenge their perspectives, that families can be this toxic as well, that you can get kind academics as well. This memoir doesn't just show these contradictions, it also places them in a history, of mostly personal.
What is the person to do, I asked, when their obligations towards their family conflict with other obligations — to friends, to society, to themselves? I began the research. I narrowed the question, made it more academic, specific. In the end, I chose four intellectual movements from the nineteenth century and examined how they had struggled with the question of family obligation.
It is in history that she could place her personal. I am glad about that. Because somehow it does impress on the idea that we are linked to education. All our personal stories are linked to education. That education is more than just transformation or metamorphosis, betrayal or falsity. It is I think creating your own reality. Your own selfhood. That even if you are two people, a fractured mind, you are still the pulse that throbs. You are still a continuity of a person being returned to mountain, which awaits your throb.
My idea of historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even arguments...
Buck Peak is phenomenal in her writing. I loved how she understood the place and its impact in her stories of her grandmother, grandfather, father and herself. We tend to understand places differently as we are growing up. During her stays, her visits, her movements, Buck Peak tends to stay like it is. It's only at the end when she mentions how the place celebrates return that I felt a freedom too. It was so freeing to read this explanation. It was different from how places 'change' or how places 'see you leaving' because a place does not gather or confine us by force.
The story is disturbing at many levels. It's shocking, personal, and made me angry in many places. But it also gives one a chance to look at their own relationships with people and how that has impacted their life.
If you want to read a personal story of a struggle that deals with basic choices (for me) of school, healthcare, and read about the historical presentness of Idaho (US), read this book.
All stories maybe are about struggle and in this regard it's no different. What it is different, is the subject matter of this story: you and where you come from.