Education set her free

Educated, A Memoir by Tara Westover is a stunning, breathtakingly powerful book. It is a recounting of her childhood as the youngest of seven children in a survivalist, fundamentalist mostly off the grid family ruled by the worst kind of patriarchy, one encompassing mental illness, paranoia, delusional religious pathology, and authoritarian tyranny focused with laser like intensity on targeting and controlling the most vulnerable. It’s about the human instinct for survival, the internal fortitude required to reject the fictions jackhammered into developing minds from birth, and the resiliency to thrive in the absence of a lifetime’s imposed structures of autocratic control, an authority often co-opting other family members into reinforcement. Family members live in a concentration camp without locks and keys, trapped by repeated humiliation, threats, deprivation of educational and medical resources, emotional and physical abuse, degradation, and shunning. It is proof that truth can be stranger than fiction, and a paean to “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”

Much of Tara’s education is a coming to terms with the lessons learned growing up about the role of women from a self serving religious fundamentalist perspective, underscored by the inability of the family to move beyond their rigid worldview. She thinks about her relationship with a violent brother, “It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there is no greater power than that.”

As her post secondary educational opportunities unfold, she adjusts the Tara of her small mountain community past to the woman reflected in the eyes of university professors and fellow students, embracing the wider world of experience and travel. She shifts the dynamics of her family, redefining herself while making difficult life choices that affirm the reality of her past, and define the life she envisions for herself. She reflects, “Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

In order to survive and thrive in this world, you must choose to free yourself from the toxic influences in your life. Not everyone can do it, but education gives you knowledge, and she learns in defining herself, knowledge is the greater power.