EDUCATED by Tara Westover

I was reluctant to read this book, because I had heard so much about it.  In some ways, this memoir resembles Angela’s Ashes, All Over But the Shoutin’, The Liars’ Club, and The Glass Castle.  These are all very different books, but they all tell the story of the author’s remarkable journey from an appalling upbringing to success as an adult.  In Educated, however, the author particularly recounts her tortured ambivalence toward her family, which is governed by her father—a fundamentalist Mormon who eschews doctors and anticipates the end of the world at any moment.  The most shocking part of the story is the physical abuse that the author suffers at the hands of an older brother.  Plus, her father and another brother are severely burned in separate workplace accidents, and neither is treated by a medical professional.  The family deals in scrap metal, and there are numerous on-the-job calamities involving machinery and just plain negligence, in addition to two horrific car accidents.  Actually, many events in this book are shocking, and the author continues to put herself in harm’s way, in some cases because she has no other recourse, and in other cases, because she does not want to estrange herself from her family.  If there is a flaw here, it is that she fails to make me understand why she has such a hard time making a clean break.  She does not paint her parents as sympathetic characters—ever.  Her mother lies to her, and her father puts everything in God’s hands, denying personal accountability for any of the catastrophes, most of which are his fault.  I get that for the first seventeen years of her life she has no outside experiences with which to compare the strict framework that she has endured.  However, once she begins to become “educated” and to realize how much she has missed out on, I expected her to let go of her previous life without remorse. Bottom line, though, hers is a remarkable story, and she tells it beautifully.