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Tara Westover - Educated: A Memoir

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Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her head-for-the-hills bag. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged metal in her fathers junkyard.Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when an older brother became violent.When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. There, she studied psychology, politics, philosophy, and history, learning for the first time about pivotal world events like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if shed traveled too far, if there was still a way home.Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes from severing ones closest ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see ones life through new eyes, and the will to change it.

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Educated is a work of nonfiction Some names and identifying details have been - photo 1
Educated is a work of nonfiction Some names and identifying details have been - photo 2

Educated is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2018 by Second Sally, Ltd.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN- P UBLICATION D ATA

N AMES : Westover, Tara, author.

T ITLE : Educated : a memoir / Tara Westover.

D ESCRIPTION : New York : Random House, [2018]

I DENTIFIERS : LCCN 2017037645 | ISBN 9780399590504 | ISBN 9780399590511 (ebook)

S UBJECTS : LCSH: Westover, TaraFamily. | WomenIdahoBiography. | SurvivalismIdahoBiography. | Home schoolingIdahoAnecdotes. | Women college studentsUnited StatesBiography. | Victims of family violenceIdahoBiography. | SubcultureIdaho. | Christian biography. | IdahoRural conditionsAnecdotes. | IdahoBiography.

C LASSIFICATION : LCC CT3262.I2 W47 2018 | DDC 270.092 [B]dc23

LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2017037645

International ISBN9780525510673

Ebook ISBN9780399590511

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

Cover illustration: Patrik Svensson

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Contents

The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we dont have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

V IRGINIA W OOLF

I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.

J OHN D EWEY

This story is not about Mormonism Neither is it about any other form of - photo 3

This story is not about Mormonism. Neither is it about any other form of religious belief. In it there are many types of people, some believers, some not; some kind, some not. The author disputes any correlation, positive or negative, between the two.

The following names, listed in alphabetical order, are pseudonyms: Aaron, Audrey, Benjamin, Emily, Erin, Faye, Gene, Judy, Peter, Robert, Robin, Sadie, Shannon, Shawn, Susan, Vanessa.

Im standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn The - photo 4

Im standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn. The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt. The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling. Down below, the valley is peaceful, undisturbed. Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver, bowing before every puff and pocket of air. Behind me a gentle hill slopes upward and stitches itself to the mountain base. If I look up, I can see the dark form of the Indian Princess.

The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind.

Turning toward our house on the hillside, I see movements of a different kind, tall shadows stiffly pushing through the currents. My brothers are awake, testing the weather. I imagine my mother at the stove, hovering over bran pancakes. I picture my father hunched by the back door, lacing his steel-toed boots and threading his callused hands into welding gloves. On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping.

I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we dont go to school.

Dad worries that the Government will force us to go but it cant, because it doesnt know about us. Four of my parents seven children dont have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because weve never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist.

Of course I did exist. I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cyclethe cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasonscircles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.

Theres a story my father used to tell about the peak. She was a grand old thing, a cathedral of a mountain. The range had other mountains, taller, more imposing, but Bucks Peak was the most finely crafted. Its base spanned a mile, its dark form swelling out of the earth and rising into a flawless spire. From a distance, you could see the impression of a womans body on the mountain face: her legs formed of huge ravines, her hair a spray of pines fanning over the northern ridge. Her stance was commanding, one leg thrust forward in a powerful movement, more stride than step.

My father called her the Indian Princess. She emerged each year when the snows began to melt, facing south, watching the buffalo return to the valley. Dad said the nomadic Indians had watched for her appearance as a sign of spring, a signal the mountain was thawing, winter was over, and it was time to come home.

All my fathers stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how Id know when it was time to come home.

Except for my sister Audrey, who broke both an arm and a leg when she was young. She was taken to get a cast.

PART ONE
My strongest memory is not a memory Its something I imagined then came to - photo 5

My strongest memory is not a memory. Its something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened. The memory was formed when I was five, just before I turned six, from a story my father told in such detail that I and my brothers and sister had each conjured our own cinematic version, with gunfire and shouts. Mine had crickets. Thats the sound I hear as my family huddles in the kitchen, lights off, hiding from the Feds whove surrounded the house. A woman reaches for a glass of water and her silhouette is lighted by the moon. A shot echoes like the lash of a whip and she falls. In my memory its always Mother who falls, and she has a baby in her arms.

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