Memoir Monday: a review of Educated

An education will save your life.

Going into this book I had very few expectations. It was recommended to me, and purchased for me, by my best friend. I trust her taste, so I knew I would enjoy the book, but I knew nothing of Tara Westover's story prior.

First and foremost this is a memoir. You are reading about Tara's real life, as she lived it. However, she is an incredible storyteller, and you will undoubtedly find yourself as immersed in her story as if you were living it right alongside her. You will hurt along with her, cry with her, and grow with her, as she discovers who she is beyond the small world in which she grew up.

Tara's life will resonate with some readers, and be totally foreign to others. In short, picture a sheltered, fundamentalist lifestyle and multiply it by at least a thousand. That was Tara Westover's upbringing.

You will spend much of the book pleading with her to run away, while simultaneously sympathizing with her, understanding how disagreeing with those you love can feel like treachery.

Tara is honest with often tragic elements of her childhood, but she couples this eloquently with a sense of nostalgia and innocence. She can marry the good with the bad as she remembers it, without sacrificing one for the other. This simply proves the overarching theme of her memoir: that education will save your life.

Someone who has never taken the time to learn and grow (be educated), will either become bitter from the trauma they endured, or never address it at all and live in self-imposed ignorance. With an education, one can hold both the good and bad, recognizing both as not mutually exclusive, but intertwined together. That truly is life in a nutshell. But it takes an education to process and understand it.

(Arguably, Tara's story has more bad than good, and in regards to "adult" themes be prepared for abuse-- physical, emotional, and sexual-- and some language; however, none of it is gratuitous).

While Tara's story does deal with education specifically, as she struggles to go to school and college in a world that does not see that as necessary for women, you will quickly find that a true education, and true self-discovery, is more than schooling. Tara becomes her own person by breaking cycles of generational trauma, by creating boundaries, by standing up for herself and others, by questioning the expectations imposed on her as a woman, and by expanding her world beyond the smallness of what she knew as a child.