EDUCATED by Tara Westover – book review

To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.”

There are five star books and there are the ones going beyond any number you can attribute. One of these exceptional ones is EDUCATED by Tara Westover.

It is a book about being, raising above and giving up on all your beliefs. It is about changing the strong foundation you were built on, opening your eyes to what is wrong, suffering abuse and finding the strength to overcome it all. It is about discovering who you really are and giving up on love

You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them…

You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.

My life was narrated for me by others

Tara is the youngest of seven children, raised by Mormon fundamentalist parents in Idaho. Her father has devoted his life to preparing for the End of Days and shown his children the same path. Tara learned from a young age that everything is Gods will be it a happy moment or death. She was educated in the spirit of God, believing that the Government is the Evil and the hospitals will not treat an illness but give you treatment that will poison and eventually kill you.

She never heard of Martin Luther King or the Holocaust and she believed Europe was a country. She first step foot in a school at the age of seventeen and ten years later she had a PhD from Cambridge. Apart from the fact that I consider her exceptional, I do see her as ambitious, determined to be like everyone else, to be normal. This meant cutting the ties with a father who always disregarded his family’s safety and well being, a mother who always followed her husband despite witnessing abuse and a deranged big brother who “educated” all his sibling with a fist and a fury that could kill.

Slowly realizing that what she suffered all her life was not normal and struggling to come to terms with reality, she suffered a nervous breakdown:

The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I’m fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I’m not falling apart. I’m just lazy. Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.

Tara Westover’s “Educated” reminds us that education is not only about learning math and science or arts but learning how to think for ourselves, stand up for what we believe in, grow and survive.