Educated: A Memoir

Wow. Devastating and so important. This is not just a relational trauma memoir but a record of a spiritual battle, a fight for the grounds of reality itself. A fight in which we will all, at some point, have to make our own stand.

Let me never, never, never try to hold someone hostage to my own world view. That is the genesis of evil.

“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.” Ch 39

THIS is what the struggle of the “end times” is about, not owning stupid hoards of food and gasoline and guns, but the ability to own your own thoughts, your own understanding, and through them to connect freely with others, not walled off in fearful isolation. The “end” refers to the end of the era when this was not fully in our own hands. Now it is. A terrifying, amazing prospect. And some have made it through, but many others are falling to the temptation to give themselves up, to bury themselves and remain dead rather than risk true life.

“Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.” Ch 40

This was an absorbing, accessible, inspiring, and disturbing book. It was a very quick read; I finished it in three days. This is a point in its favour, for me; it was so engrossing that it was effectively a page-turner. I didn't know it had been recommended by Michelle Obama or Oprah or whoever else until I came to review it here; I found it on a friend's bookshelf while housesitting and picked it up by chance.

As with many memoirs that include elements of abuse, and lifestyle choices that some readers are incapable of comprehending or accepting, there are those (well-represented in the reviews here) who doubt Westover's narrative and suspect that she embellished or invented this story. It's true that there are known cases of putative memoirs that turned out to be made up out of whole cloth. We really have no way of knowing how much (if any) of this story is true, but the fact is that all of it is plausible. Some readers are incapable of understanding that there are communities whose mores and norms diverge sharply from theirs; perhaps they are especially disturbed by some details and prefer to indulge their doubts rather than accept that in some communities, in some families, truly horrific abuse occurs. We see this in some fundamentalist religious communities, and in many cults; it shouldn't surprise anyone at this point that things like this happen. Just because most religious people – even very conservative religious people – don't experience of perpetrate abuses of this nature or degree doesn't mean they don't nevertheless happen: we have only to look at the example of the FLDS Mormon church, the Lev Tahor sect of Haredi Judaism (a tiny sect repudiated by virtually all other Jews), the experience of women and children involved in ISIS, Al-Shabaab, or Boko Haram, and so on. Even outside of religious fundamentalism, the kinds of emotional abuse and manipulation that are depicted in this story happen more often that we'd like to think. The question “why do abused women return to their husbands?” comes to mind; the psychology of people who have endured abuse of this kind is complex, but very real. I've seen it.

Again, there is simply no way of validating the veracity of this story; given that I have no evidence to disprove it, I choose to believe it. Ultimately I found it a very moving story and an engaging read. Westover is truly a very good writer, with some of the best prose I've read recently. If you like this sort of fast-moving melodrama, you will enjoy this book. Don't read it if you are inclined to doubt survivors of abuse and pick apart their testimonies, because the book will likely aggravate you.