![]() He refused to have them vaccinated or given conventional medications, such as aspirin. Like many hippies, he discouraged his children from eating processed food or washing much. After his return, he moved off his parents’ farm and up the mountain and became part of the ultra-religious, survivalist wing of the counter-culture of the ’70s. The narrator doesn’t provide much background for her parents, beyond suggesting that they themselves had gone to high school, and that Gene was himself the son of a “hot-tempered” father, who had served a two-year mission proselytizing in Floridaīefore marrying at 21. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government I do not exist. We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. The memoir begins with a school bus rolling down the highway without stopping to pick up seven-year-old Tara:ĭad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. Tara also has an unpredictable, often violent older brother. She is unable to protect her children from her husband’s erratic, sometimes loving, but often abusive behavior. ![]() ![]() Their mother is an herbalist and unlicensed midwife, officiating at risky home births. The Westover children help preserve and stockpile food as well as ammunition for ‘The End of Days’ they also build barns and work in their father’s junkyard. His paranoia is exacerbated in 1992 by a government that lays siege to and kills a member of another Idaho survivalist family - the Weavers. Though the older children were initially sent to school, then home-schooled by their mother, she and her six siblings are increasingly dominated by a father she calls “Gene,” a man who receives revelations and inveighs against the evil influence of what he calls “the Illuminati.” The Westovers were once part of their mainstream Mormon community (Tara’s grandparents live in conventional American homes), but by the time she is born they are living on its fringe. Trauma is the subtext of this memoir about a girl growing up and breaking away, and there is a lot of it. She has also been taught lessons about deprivation, violence, and psychological bullying, particularly coping with their depredations. At home, she learned about herbalism – gathering and preparing tinctures of lobelia, calendula, and skullcap, feeding livestock, and working with scrap metal in a junkyard. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”Įducation, for Tara Westover, means not only mastering the body of knowledge required by Western institutions of higher learning, but acquiring a psychological understanding of herself and her breed of survivalist family. “Think of the story, Tara,” her thesis advisor tells her, alluding to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion after Tara says she’d enjoy serving dinner more than being served. Though deficient in basic social skills, personal hygiene, and many cultural references, she studies hard and excels.Ī BYU professor chooses her for a fellowship program at Cambridge University, England a Cambridge professor sends her on another fellowship to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Inspired by an older brother, she studies for the ACT required by Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah and is accepted. It’s My Fair Lady meets Trauma and Recovery: a girl, the youngest of seven children in a survivalist household on a mountain in Idaho, decides to get an education. The writing is good, but it’s the story that’s extraordinary. Random House, 335 pages, $28.Įducated by Tara Westover is the kind of memoir that keeps you reading late at night, though you know you should put it down. Educated is a testament to the power of sensitive friends and mentors - and to Tara Westover’s own resilience.Įducated by Tara Westover.
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