Hello!
This week’s post focuses on a shocking and thrilling story. I listened to the audiobook and enjoyed it a lot! The printed version is equally brilliant. Enjoy!
mariana
Why did I read this book?
My friend Sonali moved to London over a year ago. We started working on the same team and we hit it off instantly. The first book she recommended to me was Educated by Tara Westover. At the time, the plot seemed a bit intense, so I decided to wait. I started seeing the book cover everywhere, always featured in bookstores and in reading lists, yet I couldn’t bring myself to read it. Almost a year later, my friend Khushbu got in touch and mentioned she was listening to the audiobook. Apparently the voice actress was great. I decided it was time.
What is the book about?
Mormonism: This book relates the memoirs of Tara Westover, a girl born in Idaho to a mormon family. Her home, upbringing, her every step, was deeply influenced by her father’s interpretation of Mormonism.
The power of belief vs. the power of knowledge: As children, the people that raise us have immense power over what we believe and how we interpret the world. Tara’s parents’ beliefs shaped her everyday life and her way of thinking. For example, they thought they didn’t need to send her to school or take her to a doctor if anything was wrong. Years later, Tara put herself through school, gaining access to knowledge contradicting what she had learned at home. This forced Tara to question her inherited beliefs. In the end, she had to pick a side.
The power of belonging: How far are we willing to go to belong in the groups we value most? What parts of us are we willing to sacrifice and for how long in order to belong? What is the cost of betraying our loved ones?
“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
― Tara Westover, Educated
Why should you read it?
An unbelievable journey towards freedom through self-education: Tara’s narration of her memoirs is unlike anything I had imagined possible. Her life story is surreal to me. At 17, she first set foot in a classroom, but she went on to earn a PhD from Cambridge. Hers is a wonderful story, full of obstacles (some very violent) that led her to find her own voice.
The voices in our heads: Tara Westover is my age. She grew up in a completely different reality to mine, one with a completely different set of guidelines. This book made me reflect a lot about the things we believe (or are made to believe) are normal, and the voices that lead us to those conclusions. It made me realise how easy it is to be manipulated by those we trust most. How effortlessly we can absorb and internalise other people’s beliefs as our own interpretation of the world.
“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. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
― Tara Westover, Educated
Links to buy the book
Amazon UK
Educated, Paperback (£6.29 GBP)
Amazon MX
Educated, Pasta Dura ($274.11 MXN)
Amazon US
Educated, Hardcover ($13.99 USD)
//As an Amazon Associate I earn a commission from qualifying purchases via the above links.//
Favourite quotes
//The purpose of this section is to share some of my favourite book bits, so you can come back to them when you finish a book, if you wish to do so. I’ve put in bold my favourite ones, in case you want to read a few (or all) ahead of the book.//
“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“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 wilfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanise and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“I would never again be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“Despite the singularity of her childhood, the questions her book poses are universal: How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“I’d always known that my father believed in a different God. As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. They believed in modesty; we practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal; we left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the Second Coming; we were actually prepared. For as long as I could remember, I’d known that the members of my own family were the only true Mormons I had ever known, and yet for some reason, here at this university, in this chapel, for the first time I felt the immensity of the gap. I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between.”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)
“What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves?”
― Tara Westover, (Educated)