Educated
Tara Westover
2018
Random House
pp. 352
The book is an autobiography and focuses on Tara’s life when she grew up in a conservative Mormon family and neighbourhood. There have been other influences in her life, perhaps why she has been able to shake her constraining part. The descriptions are vivid and many times, disturbing. I did sometimes wonder what is happening to the young boys and girls still growing up in the same neighbourhood.
To put all her experiences during her childhood only to their strong faith would be unfair. Several members of the family are clearly disturbed. She has been able to identify that and it must be torturous to know that she can’t do anything to help them. It is inspiring that she has been able to write journals for such a long time. I hope she still writes and is able to come out with a sequence. She may think differently about the same events twenty years from now and it would be interesting to see the change in perception over a period of years.
The book is testimony of what hard work can bring to you. I am wondering that someone who was never schooled, not even home schooled for all practical purposes, could clear tests and get a college education is because she is a genius or there is something about tests that we are missing in India. To understand trigonometry only through reading textbooks seems like an unbeatable feat. The book also demonstrates what education and an exposure to the world can do to you. College is not just about degrees, it gives you an opportunity to look at the world from a new lens and find your place in it.
I have struggled with this book. It has been on my TBR list for so long that when I got the opportunity to read it, I was very happy. The first few chapters though, were a disaster. I was very sure I wouldn’t finish it. I have managed to complete it by juggling between a paperback, a kindle edition and an audiobook. Otherwise, I would have given up on it after the first ten chapters or so.
But I managed to continue and there were lots of interesting chapters in the book. The boredom returned in the last but one chapter but then I knew I am almost there. The last chapter is a complete giveaway for her researcher life. Only a researcher would write like this. Others would be happy not questioning their own theories.