Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.
None but ourselves can free our minds."
                -Bob Marley, from 'Redemption Song,' quoted by the author

Years ago our book club read The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, a memoir of an almost unbelievably horrid childhood. This one is reminiscent in its intensity. Westover's dysfunctional family is led by a fundamentalist Mormon who is paranoid about government interference to the point of not allowing his children to go to school or seek medical help from doctors or hospitals. Tara's mother, a midwife and herbalist, exclusively provided the medical treatment. The family was waiting for the End of Days and hoarding food and other supplies in their rural Idaho home.

Since Tara had a father who failed time and again to keep his children safe and then refused help from the medical community, a brother who was almost certainly schizophrenic and a mother who refused to go against her tyrannical husband, it was not only a wonder that she eventually earned advanced degrees at prestigious schools and wrote this book, but that she survived to adulthood at all! Some families are dysfunctional but being a member of the Westover family was dangerous.

I can't say I really enjoyed the story but I did find it riveting, perhaps because Tara's upbringing was SO different from mine in a loving home. I found the structure confusing at times as it was not always chronological. I found it sad that being educated indirectly led Tara to her estrangement from her parents and some siblings. I can't help but wonder if she has reconnected with them now. My rating is a 4. More after the Page Turner meeting....

It's time for an entertaining, somewhat mindless fiction now!
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Fourteen of us met to discuss Tara Westover's memoir. Individual ratings were all over the place with an average of 3.8. I'm not sure that any of us really enjoyed the book but most admitted they found it a page-turner anyway. We used the discussion questions issued by the publisher as a jumping off place but no one needed much motivation to talk about the book. Much of our conversation centered on the author's education, both formal and informal---learning about the world outside her mountain home. I believe we were all amazed and impressed that Ms. Westover has accomplished all she has in spite of her very abnormal upbringing. A new member of our group who had grown up in an LDS community contributed beautifully to our understanding of some aspects of the book so I will rate our meeting a 5!
In seeking more information about the author of Educated: A Memoir, I found numerous interviews on YouTube. Here is a link to the one with Ellen DeGeneres, one of the shorter ones.

https://binged.it/2Zi3yEx