‘Until that moment, she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed – how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance – I was still her. At best, I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house.
That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.
You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.
I call it an education.
In this age of technology, most of us are surrounded by information. We have the internet at our fingertips 24 hours a day, which can answer any question we have. It is hard to imagine a world where access to this information is absent. But it was in this environment that Tara Westover grew up.
The youngest of seven children, Tara was born to a Mormon family who believed the end of the world was coming, and that the government was out to get them. Tara never attended school, was not formally home schooled (she was taught to read by reading the Bible, Book of Mormon and teaching of early Mormon prophets), and didn’t have a birth certificate until she was 9. Her father was so paranoid that the family was not allowed medical treatment by trained doctors, and relied on her mother’s herbal remedies and energy healing to heal even the most serious of accidents (car accidents, scaffolding falls, and serious burns to name a few). In a world her father rules with a misguided iron fist (fueled by religious zeal and bipolar rantings), a world where women are not meant to have ambition beyond children and the home, Tara finds her way to BYU, and then on to Cambridge and Harvard. Most parents would be proud of such a prestigious list of colleges attached to their child’s name, yet Tara’s parents see her education as dangerous and detrimental to her spiritual health. As she learns more about the world at large (she had never heard of the Holocaust, Martin Luther King Jr. or Napoleon), she struggles to reconcile the world her father lives in and the one she now inhabits. As she navigates her new reality, she realizes that she has to make a decision: accept her father’s version of the world and be welcomed at home, or continue finding her own truth and face the familial consequences. For anyone who has had to make a choice like this, it is never clear cut or easy. Does loyalty to your family mean more than loyalty to one’s self?
As Tara continues her schooling, she feels drawn towards history. She begins to see that history is only as accurate as the writers. Her father’s version of history had the Jews starting World War II to generate profit, and citing slaves as happier than their owners (because the slave holders were burdened with their daily care). She realizes it is the writers of history that have the power and burden of truth and accuracy in sharing their knowledge. In writing this book, she has created her own history of her life, seen through a different lens than most of her family members.
There is an Author’s Note at the beginning stating that this book is not about religion. It is, however, impossible to ignore the thread that permeates her whole story. No matter what your beliefs, this is a fascinating glimpse into a very conservative, drastic religious upbringing.
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