Recently, my alma mater instituted an online-only book club, code name Voracious Violets. I have never been part of a book club, though I ran Flying Houses in the hopes that some of the reviews would inspire a selection in one or two of them. It is unfortunate that we will not have the in-person meetings with the obligatory wine, but such is life nowadays as we recede further and further into the realm of Never Showing Up. It is all too tedious and time-consuming. It is a poor substitute at best, yet it is one I must entertain as a tribute to my alma mater. It is also a way to highlight more popular books, and participate in a greater cultural dialogue than I alone create with my idiosyncratic selections and demographic preferences. FH will remain dead, where it belongs--except for these reviews and short form posts..............
The book opens with a description of the mountain on which her family lives, the "Princess." The anthropomorphizing of the landscape suggests a more primal connection to the land and correspondingly a more primitive way of life. Her two grandmothers live nearby, one "grandma down the mountain" and one "grandma in town." There is a local grocery store that Tara later works at. I'm not sure if her family ever buys anything from it. Their family is Mormon. They're survivalists (her Dad is, so their family is). They don't live entirely off the grid but one imagines they wish they could. She comes of age in the 1980's-1990's but with the way the book opens, it might as well have been the 1930's. It is shocking that she is in "Annie" or uses the internet or hears about 9/11. She is unfamiliar with the term Holocaust.
Her mother is a midwife, and an amateur herbalist and tincturist. Her father owns a junkyard and makes all of their kids work on it. Tara is the youngest in the family. She has no birth certificate, and age is something of an afterthought, particularly as she announces her intentions to go to college, and her parents ask her to move out:
"Something broke in me, a dam or a levee. I felt tossed about, unable to hold myself in place. I screamed but the screams were strangled; I was drowning. I had nowhere to go. I couldn't afford to rent an apartment, and even if I could the only apartments for rent were in town. Then I'd need a car. I had only eight hundred dollars. I sputtered all this at Mother, then ran to my room and slammed the door.
She knocked moments later. 'I know you think we're being unfair,' she said, 'but when I was your age I was living on my own, getting ready to marry your father.'
'You were married at sixteen?' I said.
'Don't be silly,' she said, 'You are not sixteen.'
I stared at her. She stared at me. 'Yes, I am. I'm sixteen.'
She looked me over. 'You're at least twenty.' She cocked her head. 'Aren't you?'
We were silent. My heart pounded in my my chest. 'I turned sixteen in September,' I said.
'Oh.' Mother bit her lip, then she stood and smiled. 'Well, don't worry about it then. You can stay. Don't know what your dad was thinking, really. I guess we forgot. Hard to keep track of how old you kids are.'" (137)
At this point I'm compelled to mention a couple weird things about this book. The first is the note near the beginning on pseudonyms. A few times when a character was introduced, I flipped back to see if it was one of the pseudonymous characters or not. Notably her mom is one of them. I don't understand why one would call some people by their name and some by a name to protect their identity. Unless Westover is itself a pen name, it would probably not be that difficult to figure out who they were. I'd imagine this is because they didn't agree to becoming a character in her book. This is one of the things about memoirs that always intrigues me. Do you have to give the manuscript to everyone that gets mentioned in order to secure their permission? What is the purpose behind using some real names and some fake ones? My hope would be that the pseudonyms given are chosen by the subjects themselves. More likely, they declined to read the manuscript in the first place, and Westover decided to change their name of respect for their preference to remain anonymous.
The other weird thing is when she paraphrases specific sentences in e-mails or letters in italics. Every time, there is an asterisk. And the asterisk always reads that, while the words are not exactly the ones used, the meaning has been preserved. Now really, who saves everything and expects people to be able to quote the exact words used every time? Perhaps this is an odd outgrowth of Westover's Ph.D. research and writing, a lamentation for her inability to describe every event in excruciatingly accurate detail. Asterisks are similarly employed to supplant Westover's memory with those of her siblings and others that experienced the same event. These are generally more comprehensible and serve to explore a major theme of all memoirs--the reliability of memory.
Unfortunately I need to jump into murky waters to qualify that last sentence, because while I am sufficiently convinced that Westover is leaving as little to the imagination as possible, I am not convinced that she is printing the truth, rather than the legend. The "unfortunately" part is the comparison at least one person in the book club made to a similarly famous memoir from about ten years earlier that I never read that dealt with crack addiction, I believe, and something about painful dental procedures. Many of the things in that book were completely made up. Now we all know that truth is stranger than fiction, but from the way Westover describes some of the more gruesome accidents on the mountain, one could hardly believe they were as bad as she makes them out to be. They should all be dead. At the very least, her brother Shawn and her father are physically mangled beyond belief. Shawn suffers life-threatening injuries on at least three occasions, possibly four or five, one of which is a motorcycle accident:
"Dwain hefted Shawn onto his back. For a second that contained an hour, I stared at my brother, watching the blood trickle out of his temple and dawn his right cheek, pouring over his ear and onto his white T-shirt. His eyes were closed, his mouth open. The blood was oozing from a hole the size of a golf ball in his forehead. It looked as though his temple had been dragged on the asphalt, scraping away skin, then bone. I leaned close and peered inside the wound. Something soft and spongy glistened back at me. I slipped out of my jacket and pressed it to Shawn's head." (145)
Her mom, her brother Luke and Tara herself are also mangled very badly, but not quite to the point that death is a foregone conclusion. Maybe her mom fits between these two extremes on the death-defection-spectrum. In any case, while I don't doubt any of the events occurred, I doubt that Westover isn't following in the grand literary tradition of the oral historians 3,000 years hence. These people have turned into characters that have god-like abilities. Perhaps this is just what one develops through such an upbringing, an extreme hardiness, a sort of superhuman grit. It is no wonder, then, that she could achieve all she already has by her age.
The real strength of this book comes in the form of its two most controversial figures: her father and Shawn. The way Westover writes about them is extremely touching. While her father puts her in ridiculously dangerous situations and casually subjugates her, her brother acts as a mentor, protector, and bully. Bully is really too weak of a word: monster might be more accurate. There really is no good word for what he is to her. She writes about him with love and fear, and unquestionably, their relationship is the heart of this story.
Tara's 5 other siblings figure far less prominently in the narrative. After Shawn, they are probably featured most often in this order: Tyler, Audrey, Luke, Richard, and ??? Obviously Tyler is memorable. He lays out the path for Tara's escape, taking the ACT and moving out for college and eventually getting a Ph.D. He introduces her to non-hymnal music. The family can be broken down into those who stay with the family and those who break with the family. Audrey and Luke stay. Audrey backs up Shawn and their Dad, as does their Mom (though their Mom does have oddly conflicting views of western medicine, as she seems to acknowledge that her husband is bipolar). Luke does not seem to treat Tara as an enemy quite like Shawn and Audrey, however. Richard seems like Tyler Jr. I need to check on that last sibling....(It's Tony, the oldest, and I don't remember anything about him.)
In summation, Educated is about as good as you heard. It's worth reading. It won't make the Best Books list just because it's too popular. It doesn't need my seal of approval. It's probably a really great book for anyone that's stuck in a one-horse town, so to speak, that dreams of breaking out. Also a solid choice for high schoolers in general. As someone just a few years older than Westover, I appreciate the cultural reference points. I doubt that the book is 100% accurate, but I also doubt that any memoir can be 100% accurate.
Up next: A Gentleman in Moscow...
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