Educated
by Tara Westover: notes by Richard, thanks to others for sharing theirs.
BBBC
Meeting: Thursday, 4th July
2019, Flower and Forrester, Combe Down
Present:
Richard (his book choice), Andrew, ChrisB, ChrisW, John, MarkT, MarkW, Steve, Willm.
Apols,
score and notes received: MarkT,
Overall, this was
a book almost universally appreciated - I hesitate to use the word ‘enjoyed’ as
there is much that is not actually enjoyable in this memoir - but all were
clear that this was a good book, and most thought it to be either very good or
exceptional (in terms of scores, we had three in the 9s, 3 in the 8s, a 7.5, a
7.25 and a 6.6). Almost everyone had a
great deal to say about the book, and it generated quite a lot of discussion. Most agreed that it was ‘a remarkable book’,
and terms such as ‘I loved the book’, ‘it was an amazing book’, etc. abounded.
Many people stated that although
they tended to prefer fiction, this book was an exception to that, being both
extremely thought-provoking, and almost novel-like in its themes structure and
exposition (in fact some queried whether or not it WAS factual, or was in fact
a novel ….).
One of us
summarised that this was a book about religion and faith, memory and truth,
reality and sanity and perception, tyranny and power, abuse, guilt and shame,
attachment and detachment, loyalty and love, and what makes up a person. –
Quite a lot, really!
More
Detail: all were agreed that this book was not about religion per se, but
rather about
·
the power and devastating effect of
early and regular abuse on later self-esteem and ability to move forwards in
the world, even if one is actually resilient.
·
the power of various protective
factors (such as her belief in the protectiveness of her mother, her
relationship with Tyler, Tyler introducing her to music, the closeness and love
from at least some of her grandparents, and her native intelligence) to assist
resilience.
·
the power of education – not just
academic education, although that in itself is very powerful, but what
education IS: “Everything I had worked
for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege:
to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and
to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that
the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at
the heart of what it means to self-create” – or to be educated.’
·
the unreliability of memory, and of
how we all construct and reconstruct our memories, all of the time – as the
author writes later in the book: “The
future could be different from the past. Even the past could be different from
the past, because my memories could change: I no longer remembered Mother
listening in the kitchen while Shawn pinned me to the floor, pressing my
windpipe. I no longer remembered her looking away.”
It was agreed that this was quite an amazing account of an almost
unbelievable journey, from a family that, as a child, she believed was right
and which rejected everything society has developed for people’s benefit,
however flawed and distorted at times; through the ‘slow-burn’ realisation that what
she had experienced was oppression and abuse. One clever writing device she uses is that the
way she describes this journey means that the reader has to realise this in the same way that she starts
to realise
and accept it.
All were
also agreed that both the writing, and the story she told, was compelling: accidents
to the various children and adults and the graphic descriptions of the
aftermaths - her burned brother, her burned father, the car-crash-injured
family members; the physical and psychological abuse of and cruelty to Tara by
Shawn; and much more.
All again
were agreed that this was an honest and very readable account; that she writes
exceptionally well, and has some lovely ways of describing and phrasing things:
‘easy to read, with fluent prose and some great turns of phrase’. This is true
both for her descriptions of the physical environment, especially her ‘home
mountain’, but also of the places such as Cambridge and Harvard where she
studied, and in her turns of phrase, such as “Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim
certainty”: a lovely phrase, and an important idea, for her in her journey
and more generally. It was felt that her
writing held an air of innocence, possibly partly attributable to her having
read so little of others’ and hence not being over-exposed to other influences
– instead she wrote very conversationally, in a way very reflective of how
people actually speak and think. ‘Effortless and unencumbered’.
It was felt that Tara told her life story so
skilfully, she somehow allows us to both experience what she went through and
yet disassociate from the worst parts, simultaneously, in the same way she did.
She did this so seamlessly that it was only on stepping back one could realise what a brilliant writing technique it is: offering, in the same
sentence, a narrative of what her future self came to understand was happening
to her, and at the same time to relay perfectly how the young girl she was then,
lived it.
There is a
lot in this book (and this was an area which developed and got progressively
larger) about the awful way that this (and many other religions and cultures –
it was remarked that this was ‘The Handmaiden’s Tale writ large, in real life’)
not only treat women, but also make them think and feel about
themselves. The whole set of
descriptions about the use of the word ‘whore’
and the terrible double standards applied to men and women, about sex and
sexuality and dress of course, but even more to how they are brainwashed into
thinking about themselves. As she
writes: “I evolved a new understanding of
the word “whore,” one that was less about actions and more about essence. It
was not that I had done something wrong so much as that I existed in the
wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being. “It’s
strange how you give the people you love so much power over you”, I had written
in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have
imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than
that.” There was an interesting
discussion about the idea that it is in these ways that these religions and
cultures create such terrible distorted self-images in their members,
especially their female ones. Her description later of how she could not accept
praise, or help was again very powerful: “I
could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to
me; I choked on it. I wanted the professor to shout at me, wanted it so deeply
I felt dizzy from the deprivation. The ugliness of me had to be given
expression. If it was not expressed in his voice, I would need to express
it in mine.”
The Stockholm
Syndrome was mentioned [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22447726] as
having great similarities to the impact that such long-term brainwashing has on
people. Even later in Tara’s journey, when she tries to change things, she
takes all the blame and responsibility for the fact that her family is being
divided – it is her fault for raising the issue, not their fault
for having done the things in the first place. Indeed, the whole area of how she ‘rocked the
boat’ and the ways that people responded to that, and then changed their
responses, was extremely interesting and generated much comment, with many
talking about the mother’s behaviour as being ‘a damning indictment’. But on the other hand, Tara talks about why
her mother failed to live up to what she had said she would do to support her:
“But hers or not, those words, which had
so comforted and healed me, were hollow. I don’t believe they were faithless,
but sincerity failed to give them substance, and they were swept away by other,
stronger currents.” So she was
sincere, but that sincerity did not have any substance to it.
This
upbringing created Tara, a person burdened by shame and guilt; not being able
to make sense of things, how to reconcile her new and old lives - having to
disconnect her university life from her life at home. And all of these
conflicts were extremely stressful, and all underpinned by her feelings of
having been let down by the very people she (and we) believe should be there to
protect her, her parents: “We had been bruised and gashed and concussed, had
our legs set on fire and our heads cut open. 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.” Yet although
her parents and brother not only do not protect Tara from danger and harm, they
lead her into both; she persists in trying to stay part of the family and
trying to fix things - years after she left home, she is still trying to win
the love of her parents which they had still never given, and only grudgingly
offer to her at the end of the book, and only with huge and unacceptable
conditions attached.
Another
generally agreed aspect was that, although the book was full of alarming and
awful events and people and behaviours, it was very moving at times, with the
author generally avoiding being sentimental or melodramatic.
There were
also flashes of humour – her incredulity over Rosa Parks taking a seat on the
bus, which puzzled her as it seemed an odd thing to steal – which also helped
to leaven out the awful things.
Other
elements that people liked were:
·
her descriptions of family and
friends and tutors: you feel you really know them, especially, her mother and
father, and Shawn, Audrey and Tyler.
·
the references
throughout to music (and to performance), and the power of music to transcend
some of the more awful elements – it was interesting that her father, so
opposed to her going out into the community, embraced this when she either
sang, or obtained parts in theatrical performances;
·
the intellectual
power that was occasionally revealed, in a number of ways, but including her
PhD and her choices about it: her PhD “didn’t
treat Mormonism as the objective of human history, but neither did it discount
the contribution Mormonism had made in grappling with the questions of the age.
Instead, it treated the Mormon ideology as a chapter in the larger human story.
In my account, history did not set Mormons apart from the rest of the human
family; it bound them to it.” As one
of us stated, this was her intellectual resolution: her mental resolution took
longer.
·
the lack of trust in
conventional medicine and the reliance on
non-Western medicine, to an extreme degree – and how this then led to great
wealth for the family;
·
the underpinning
issues in all traditional or immigrant or minority religious communities: of
conformity to tradition versus assimilation and ‘fitting in’ to the prevailing
or surrounding culture, and of how difficult it is for parents to steer a
course through these areas (or even if they should do so, versus instead embracing
assimilation and the idea of the ‘melting pot’);
·
some of her throwaway observations,
such as “I began to experience the most
powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money”;
·
excellent descriptions of her various mental
states as she battles with her family loyalty and recognition that she cannot
have both emancipation and family life;
·
how in the USA it is possible to live ‘off
grid’;
·
the rather amazing fact that, of
the 7 siblings, three managed to escape, and all of those obtained PhDs, all
with no formal education until the age of about 17. There was a discussion over
whether education allowed them to escape, or whether they escaped and then
found education (or some mix of the two), but it was clear that education was a
key to her continued escape, as it is to so many others: she and her siblings
who managed to get educated could leave the thrall of the family mores, but
those who could not had neither the life chances nor the money to avoid
employment in the family and hence acceptance of all it believes. In many ways,
this book describes the nature of all extremists, told through a family story:
no other view is worthy of consideration, because the “truth” is God’s truth,
as told by the patriarch.
There were
also a few areas which people were critical about, or were less wholeheartedly
positive.
·
A few people raised the issue of
sexual abuse, and found it unlikely that with so much physical abuse, in a
situation where women were so badly treated, that there would not also be sexual
abuse – and that in fact sex was a theme largely absent in the book.
·
A number felt that she was in some way
‘holding back’ all the way through, although it was unclear why that was. It may have been due to sexual abuse; it may
be that much of the book is a result of ‘false memory’ – and it was suggested
that, in the same way as many of the ‘negative’ characters had been given pseudonyms,
there might be a number of issues which the publishers had decided could not be
included. One of use suggested that the book would have been gone over
extremely carefully by lawyers, to remove various elements.
·
Others felt that, by virtue of it
being a memoir, the part of a novel which is based on imagination was missed
(although others suggested that maybe a lot of the book was fictional anyway!)
·
One of us felt that although the first
half was compelling, gradually, the 2nd half became less so; and the
ending appeared too trite.
