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Reading Tara Westover’s Educated: A Memoir was most definitely painful for me, both as a parent and as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As a parent, I cringed at the negligence and abuse that suffused Westover’s childhood. I pitied Tara’s parents–her obviously mentally ill father, her slowly dominated mother–even while I wanted to shake them; I shuddered at her violent older brother. As a member of what Westover refers to as the Mormon church–a nickname commonly accepted at the time Educated was published–I was deeply saddened by the warped view of it that she experienced so frequently. (She specifically notes that she knew her parents were different from their fellow church members, but at least one of her friends from BYU had some serious deficiencies in his understanding as well.) As a human being, well–this was a disturbing book to read.
On the other hand, it was also a riveting one. Westover has a gift for bringing to life a world utterly foreign to most of us, and a compassion for her family members that requires both love and maturity. Her journey is an incredible one, and while I wondered about some of the trivialities–how did she pay for her traveling back and forth to Idaho from her different places of study?–I marveled at the breadth of it. If I’d known fully what I was getting into, I might have balked–literarily experiencing the wrenching heartbreak of someone else’s pain is emotionally exhausting–but I am in no way sorry that I read it. Educated: A Memoir is a book worth reading, a story worth telling, and–ultimately–a journey worth following.*
*Many thanks to the Random House Marketing team, who provided me with an ARE and welcomed my honest opinion of it.