Cushla McKinney reviews Tara Westover's Educated, published by Penguin Random House.
Coming as it does in a social and political climate dominated by fake news and the dissolution of the boundaries between private and public life, Tara Westover's memoir seems a perfect reflection of the zeitgeist.
Westover's father was a Mormon fundamentalist who dedicated his life to stockpiling food, fuel and weapons in preparation for the End of Days, and she was raised in accordance with his own, idiosyncratic interpretation of the faith.
Rather than attend school, she and her siblings worked in the family's scrap yard and construction business, enterprises run with such casual disregard for safety that it is amazing any of them survived the numerous serious injuries they incurred - not least because these were treated by their mother using herbal and homeopathic remedies of her own devising.
But the most dangerous member of the family was her brother Shawn, whose mentally and physically abusive behaviour was ignored by his parents and excused by Westover herself.
It was not until she turned 17, having taught herself enough basic mathematics and science to gain entrance to Brigham Young University, that she realised just how far her reality was from that of other people's, and it took both physical and psychological separation from her family to adjust to the fact the world (and her place in it) could be so different from what she was raised to believe in. Her attempts to understand and reconcile these contradictory ways of being form the heart of the book.
It is hard to know how to respond to such a story. On the one hand it is inspirational to watch Westover's transformation from a girl who had never heard of the Holocaust, but it is also clear that without both supportive mentors and her own intellectual and emotional resilience, none of this would have been possible.
And although her story is a salutary reminder of how our perceptions are shaped by circumstance, it is also a form of personal therapy; the desire for her father's approval and her mother's protection are a recurrent theme, as is her ambivalence towards Shawn, who was both protector and tormentor (her attempts to expose his abuse left her estranged from all three).
While obviously matters of great personal importance, the openness with which she works through these issues invites a degree of intimacy I found uncomfortably voyeuristic. Similarly, the fact her parents still cleave to their beliefs is a salutary reminder of how dislocated parts of modern society remain. Educated left me profoundly disturbed.
Suffice it to say, reader discretion is advised.
- Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist
