Tara Westover's "Educated": From an Idaho Mt. to Cambridge Univ.

Caption: Tara Westover, author of "Educated," a memoir of a home-schooled girl from Idaho who didn't set foot in a classroom until she was 17. From there she went to Brigham Young University, then Harvard. She got her Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University in England.

Tara Westover read parts of her book "Educated" to an overflow crowd on the second floor of Prairie Lights bookstore on Saturday, May 19th. She answered questions posed by the moderator and from the crowd. I was horrified by one of the questions, but her answer to that question was revealing.

"What would reconciliation with your family look like?" someone asked Westover.

"I can love my family without their changing. I can forgive my family without their changing, but I can't be with them unless they change," she said.

"Bravo!" I wanted to shout, but of course I didn't. I admired her clear, concise, and thoughtful answer.

Tara is one of seven children. She is close with three of her brothers. She eschews contact with her parents, a sister who is five years older than she is, and of course, Shawn, the brother who sadistically abused her, both physically and emotionally. I'll let you decide whether there was a sexual component to it.

Her story is a tale of triumph over very long odds. It's wrenching and instructive. With her intellect and persistence, with help from mentors along the way, she rose from working for her father in his scrapyard in the wilds of Idaho to the ancient halls of Cambridge.

Her Cambridge mentor, Prof. Steinberg, was delighted to discover that she was home-schooled until she was 17. "'How marvelous,' he said smiling. 'It's as if I've stepped into [George Bernard] Shaw's Pygmalion.'"

Steinberg let her read what she wanted. She wrote a page or an essay about what she read. She said, "No comma, no adjective or adverb was beneath [Prof. Steinberg's] interest. He made no distinction between grammar and content, between form and substance. A poorly written sentence was a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction."

He praised her final essay on a topic of her own choosing, an essay comparing Edmund Burke with Publius, the persona under which Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay had written The Federalist Papers. She barely slept for two weeks to write the essay.

"'I have been teaching in Cambridge for thirty years,' [Prof. Steinberg] told Tara after he read her essay. 'And this is one of the best essays I've ever read.'"

"Tara had a desperate desire to get out of the room. 'I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness,' she said. 'Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it. I wanted the professor to shout at me... 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.'"

Her abuse intrudes in flashbacks; she can't handle praise because it's not what she's used to. She imagined herself at Cambridge, "a graduate student wearing a long back robe that swished as I strode through ancient corridors. Then I was hunching in a bathroom, my arm behind my back, my head in the toilet."

She flashes back to one of the times that her brother Shawn tortured her. She thinks that time defines her.

"I couldn't picture the girl in the whirling black gown without seeing that other girl. Scholar or whore, both couldn't be true. One was a lie.

"'I can't go,' I said. 'I can't pay the fees.'

"'Let me worry about the fees,' Professor Steinberg said."

When Tara Westover signed my book, I told her that her book helped me find a path with my own family of origin.

"That's why I wrote it," she said. She'd said earlier that she didn't know of any books about people finding their way past the obstructions of family dysfunction and she wanted to help people.

She signed the flyleaf, "To Maria -- Wishing you a peaceful path. Tara."

She signed her name with a flourish, enclosing her name in a protective circle. As she completed the circle, she crossed out her name with a final stroke of her pen. I'm no expert handwriting analyst, but I've read enough handwriting analysis books to know it's not good when a person crosses out their name in a signature. Her book means a lot to me. I want her to be okay.

I understand her dilemma because it's hard to grow up as a child, loving and trusting your parents and wanting them to be truthful, loving, and trustworthy in return. It's hard when you learn your parents are crazy, that they can't be trusted, that your family isn't even safe.

Tara's father said, "'I'm looking forward to your graduation. The Lord has a few choice rebukes for me to give them professors.'

"'You will not,' [Tara] said quietly.

"'If the Lord moves me, I will stand and speak.'

"'You will not,' [Tara] repeated.

Her parents didn't come to her graduation.

At Cambridge, she found out that her mother's home-made essential oils were popular and were selling like hotcakes. Of course, her father spent the money his wife made as he saw fit. Tara grinned and said, "From what I could tell, Dad was on track to become the best-funded lunatic in the Mountain West."

Male supremacy, especially as exemplified by her fundamentalist Mormon father and brother Shawn, is not Tara's thing. She doubts that she will marry. I hope she can find happiness. She certainly has found success in her writing career. I know that I will read this beautifully written, honest, and insightful book again. There's a lot in it for me and hopefully for you, too. The journey Tara Westover took is immense. She's uncommonly wise for someone so young.