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Educated: A Memoir

Tara Westover

Last accessed on Tuesday July 7, 2020

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Yellow highlight | Location: 950 Note | Location: 950

“Don’t you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?” Grandma said. Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, “I teach them not to piss on their hands.”

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had a pair of leather gloves, but when Dad saw them he said they’d slow me down. “You’ll get calluses real quick,” he promised as I handed them over. I’d found a hard hat in the shop, but Dad took that, too. “You’ll move slower trying to balance this silly thing on your head,” he said.

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One day Mother announced that she had reached a new skill level. “I no longer need to say the question aloud,” she said. “I can just think it.”

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One afternoon, after he’d caught me looking at the math book, he and I spent an hour hauling buckets of water across the field to his fruit trees, which wouldn’t have been at all unusual except it was during a rainstorm.

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Then I would make a circle with my index finger and my thumb, and push the bottle through the circle. The strength of the homeopathic, Mother said, depended on how many passes the bottle made through my fingers, how many times it drew on my energy. Usually I stopped at fifty.

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Yellow highlight | Location: 1,383 Note | Location: 1,383

I stared at the gray hairs on the back of Dad’s head. He was sitting quietly, listening to Mother, who continued to insult Caroline, to say how shocking the costumes were, how obscene. Dad nodded as we bumped up the icy driveway, becoming less angry with every word from Mother.

Note:Abuse prevention

Yellow highlight | Location: 1,490 Note | Location: 1,490

“If I had tonsils like yours, I’d go outside every morning and stand in the sun with my mouth open—let those rays seep in for a half hour or so. They’ll shrink in no time.” He called it a treatment. I did it for a month. It was uncomfortable, standing with my jaw dropped and my head tilted back so the sun could shine into my throat. I never lasted a whole half hour. My jaw would ache after ten minutes, and I’d half-freeze standing motionless in the Idaho winter.

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Yellow highlight | Location: 1,551 Note | Location: 1,551

He sat as if posed, with no agitation, no embarrassment, as if there were a perfectly mundane explanation for why he was sitting up, alone, at near two in the morning, watching Ralph and Alice Kramden prepare for a Christmas party. He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark. But God withheld the flood.

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Mother said it was time for another trip to Arizona.

Note:Bipolar

Yellow highlight | Location: 2,533 Note | Location: 2,533

When she withdrew a can of Diet Coke, which my father said was a violation of the Lord’s counsel for health, I again fled to my room.

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Yellow highlight | Location: 2,800 Note | Location: 2,800

feeling that somehow they were immodest. They weren’t, not technically, but I knew why I wanted them—for my body, so it would be noticed—and that seemed immodest even if the clothes were not.

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That was how Dad and Shawn became comrades, even if they only agreed on one thing: that my brush with education had made me uppity, and that what I needed was to be dragged through time. Fixed, anchored to a former version of myself.

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I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.

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Yellow highlight | Location: 3,065 Note | Location: 3,065

I became erratic, demanding, hostile. I devised a bizarre and ever-evolving rubric by which I measured his love for me, and when he failed to meet it, I became paranoid.

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Yellow highlight | Location: 3,279 Note | Location: 3,279

Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars.

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I’d believed the money would be used to control me, but what it did was enable me to keep my word to myself: for the first time, when I said I would never again work for my father, I believed it.

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A thousand dollars. Extra. That I did not immediately need. It took weeks for me to come to terms with this fact, but as I did, I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.

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We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at any moment. Because Dad always put faith before safety. Because he believed himself right, and he kept on believing himself right—after the first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it was us who paid.

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Dad had always been a hard man—a man who knew the truth on every subject and wasn’t interested in what anybody else had to say. We listened to him, never the other way around: when he was not speaking, he required silence.

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“I’m just standing,” I said. “You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.” “The way it is nothing to you,” he said. —

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It’s astonishing that I used to believe all this without the slightest suspicion, I wrote. The whole world was wrong; only Dad was right.

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“Negative liberty,” he said, “is the freedom from external obstacles or constraints. An individual is free in this sense if they are not physically prevented from taking action.”

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Yellow highlight | Location: 4,068 Note | Location: 4,068

“Positive liberty,” another student said, “is freedom from internal constraints.” I wrote this definition in my notes, but I didn’t understand it. The lecturer tried to clarify. He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.

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Yellow highlight | Location: 4,098 Note | Location: 4,098

None but ourselves can free our minds. Then I picked up my phone and dialed. “I need to get my vaccinations,” I told the nurse.

Note:Irony

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,340 Note | Location: 4,340

It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.

Note:What shame do we hide

Yellow highlight | Location: 4,673 Note | Location: 4,673

I began to defer, always, to the judgment of others. If Drew remembered something differently than I did, I would immediately concede the point. I began to rely on Drew to tell me the facts of our lives. I took pleasure in doubting myself about whether we’d seen a particular friend last week or the week before, or whether our favorite crêperie was next to the library or the museum. Questioning these trivial facts, and my ability to grasp them, allowed me to doubt whether anything I remembered had happened at all.

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became obsessed with their ideas about the family—with how a person ought to weigh their special obligations to kin against their obligations to society as a whole.

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An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor.

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I willed myself to believe it—to believe there was no real difference between what I knew to be true and what I knew to be false.

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“I am called of God to testify that disaster lies ahead of you,” Dad said. “It is coming soon, very soon, and it will break you, break you utterly. It will knock you down into the depths of humility. And when you are there, when you are lying broken, you will call on the Divine Father for mercy.” Dad’s voice, which had risen to fever pitch, now fell to a murmur. “And He will not hear you.”

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What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.

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Yellow highlight | Location: 5,019 Note | Location: 5,019

There was a puzzle in it, something unresolved. What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves?

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Yellow highlight | Location: 5,066 Note | Location: 5,066

Mother was marketing her products as a spiritual alternative to Obamacare, and she was selling product as fast as she could make it, even with dozens of employees.

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Yellow highlight | Location: 5,082 Note | Location: 5,082

I wanted to answer her prayer—I was barely more than ten miles from the mountain—but I knew what unspoken pact I would be making as I walked through that door. I could have my mother’s love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.

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Yellow highlight | Location: 5,122 Note | Location: 5,122

My mother refused to come. She would not go without my father, and he would have nothing to do with Angie.

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Now I thought about it, I realized that all my siblings, except Richard and Tyler, were economically dependent on my parents. My family was splitting down the middle—the three who had left the mountain, and the four who had stayed. The three with doctorates, and the four without high school diplomas. A chasm had appeared, and was growing.

Note:Leverage

Yellow highlight | Location: 5,178 Note | Location: 5,178

But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.

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Yellow highlight | Location: 5,188 Note | Location: 5,188

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.

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