Honestly, I haven’t been reading much during this quarantine. The renovation has taken most of my time, but before we closed I finally finished, Educated by Tara Westover. This memoir took me a particularly long time to finish. While I am a slower reader, it wasn’t the words that made it difficult, it was the content. I had to stop, put it down, and do something else for a day or two. I know my brain and the way I absorb content. I’m sensitive and over the years I’ve become acutely aware of my emotional capacity. It’s really hard for me to be in the mental illness and violence spaces. Tara’s story is gripping, her writing impeccable and many readers will move right through it, but I had to give it time.
When you begin reading its understood that in order to write this type of memoir, therapy had to play a part. Still, I breathed a sigh of relief when I read that she began attending therapy.
I found it hard to read about the mental illness of her father, but even more so that of her brother, Shawn. He manipulates a young Tara into believing that the violence he brings upon her is her fault. As a teenager, Tara, doesn’t know how to contradict that manipulation, especially in the environment she is raised in.
Another element that I found difficult to stomach were the instances where her mother and father look the other way to violence, safety, and the general health of their children. They also twist the Mormon religion and use it as a tool of manipulation toward their children. It’s unfathomable that parents wouldn’t want to do everything they could to protect their children.
There are so many ways, Educated is a perfect title for this memoir. But while she does get an an amazing university education, it was the education of the world outside the mountain, the education of who she was as a person, apart from her families ideas that I found to be the most profound.
It’s intense but a must read. It opens your eyes to a world we don’t see everyday. When you read a memoir like this you enter the authors world for a minute. If your an empath, like me, you might digest it deeper. It’s important to know your limits and it’s okay to take a book at your own pace or even to say, “No thanks, it’s too much for me.”