Educated, by Tara Westover (Random House, New York 2018). This memoir is the story of Tara Westover's childhood and young adulthood in a family headed by her fanatical Mormon father in a remote Idaho town. The father is a paranoid religious zealot who demands that his wife and children follow his peculiar ideas of family life. An older brother sadistically abuses Tara throughout her growing up. She eventually breaks free of the family and discovers a new life in the academic worlds of Oxford and Harvard universities. She's a very smart, talented woman. It's a tortuous path. Each step is a struggle against the bonds of -- remarkably -- family love and devotion.
Westover is a good writer. The scenes of her childhood working in dangerous conditions in her father's enormous junkyard are nicely detailed and vivid. Imagine a 14 year old girl surrounded by sharp rusted metal, and a father who routinely drops tons of debris near his children, often injuring them. She has no choice but to work here. She is injured numerous times by the actions of her schizophrenic, abusive father. The father is forever afraid the federal government will come and take his children away. He has good reason to fear this. By any reasonable standard, his behavior toward his family is criminally negligent and abusive. This is not about Mormonism per se, but about religious and political fanaticism to the point of serious delusion.
Then there's the old brother Shawn. A psychopath who enforces the father's strange ideas of proper behavior for girls. He routinely demands obeisance from Tara, and if she resists, he physically tortures her.
"I was yanked to my feet. Shawn grasped a fistful of my hair--using the same method as before, catching the clump near my scalp so he could maneuver me--and dragged me into the hallway...'Now the bitch cries,' Shawn said. 'Why? Because someone sees you for the slut you are?'" He savagely beats her. This was Shawn's punishment for her having an innocent date with a boy in town her age. Shawn begs her forgiveness afterwards. Which doesn't prevent him from doing the same thing a few weeks later. These scenes are repeated in one form or another until Tara manages to escape the family.
Where is her mother in all this? A midwife, a maker of homeopathic remedies (snake oil, basically), but a shrewd businesswoman, the mother is herself browbeaten by her husband. She fails to protect her daughter and children from their father and Shawn. Amazingly, she builds her remedies into a successful business, hiring other women from the town to create the bogus formulas.
It's sickening. And yet Tara loves these people. She's devoted to them. She believes them.
Despite her parents' objections, Tara manages to go to Brigham Young University. There she begins to sense that a different life, a different sense of womanhood, is possible. The last third of the memoir is about her struggle to be educated, to live apart from her family. Her talent as a writer and thinker are recognized by a number of professors (all men), and almost improbably she goes to Oxford and then Harvard, where she eventually completes a PhD in History. This last part of the book is not as complex and riveting as the earlier chapters. But she does create an effective portrait of the devastating struggle to be educated, to think for herself free of her family.
