Educated

by Tara Westover

“Doctors and pills,” Dad said, nearly shouting. “That’s their god, and they whore after it.”

It's wild knowing people like this

In Arizona, there was no wind.

Not 100% true. There are definitely crazy windy days. It depends on the area ig

The coin soothed me. It seemed to me that Tyler’s buying it was a declaration of loyalty, a pledge to our family that despite the madness that had hold of him, that made him want to go to school, ultimately he would choose us.

Mother dressed the leg in mullein and comfrey salve, her own recipe.

Honestly, comfrey is pretty magical. I would still go to the doctor though

A few days later, Mother drove me forty miles to a small shop whose shelves were lined with exotic shoes and strange acrylic costumes. Not one was modest. Mother went straight to the counter and told the attendant we needed a black leotard, white tights and jazz shoes. “Keep those in your room,” Mother said as we left the store. She didn’t need to say anything else. I already understood that I should not show the leotard to Dad.

“I’ll find the money,” he told Mother when they went to bed that night. “You get her to that audition.”

Tears.

All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine—that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself.

We walked to the shop. Shawn shuffled around for a few minutes, then emerged with a handful of steel screws. We walked back to the house and he installed the lock, humming to himself and smiling, flashing his baby teeth.

THAT SATURDAY, I SAT at my desk with a stack of homework. Everything had to be finished that day because I could not violate the Sabbath.

going to a religious institusion really has us like this

DAD SAID I WAS BECOMING “uppity.”

OMG

I had read that slaves in colonial times were happier and more free than their masters, because the masters were burdened with the cost of their care.

Nah, this is what they're trying to teach now and thats insane

that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.

To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both.

Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. 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.

In this account, it was then that they feared for his life, and that is when my sister called me, only I misunderstood and assumed that the explosion had happened the day before.

This reminds me of my dad's accident when I was in middle school.

“If you’re in America,” he’d whispered, “we can come for you. Wherever you are. I’ve got a thousand gallons of fuel buried in the field. I can fetch you when The End comes, bring you home, make you safe. But if you cross the ocean…”

a city that is both a living organism and a fossil.

I could admire the past without being silenced by it.

It is painful to face reality, she wrote. To realize there was something ugly, and I refused to see it.*2

If the first fall was God’s will, whose was the second?