Educated

by Tara Westover

you feel the world around you more than you see it.

Mother did her makeup every morning, but if she didn’t have time she’d apologize all day, as if by not doing it, she had inconvenienced everyone.

She stopped wearing makeup, then she stopped apologizing for not wearing it.

don’t know if she talked it over with Dad first.

Creates speculation on unclear things

This would, she believed, shield her daughters from the social contempt that had so wounded her.

In contrast to the theme

She’s grasping for humor but the memory is jaundiced.

Now I’m older, I sometimes wonder if Dad’s fervor had more to do with his own mother than with doctrine.

Speculation

I doubt he expected to go to college.

Speculation

Fourteen years after the incident with the Weavers, I would sit in a university classroom and listen to a professor of psychology describe something called bipolar disorder.

Looking ahead

When I picture her now I conjure a single image, as if my memory is a slide projector and the tray is stuck.

Her eyes are pleasant but unoccupied, as if she’s observing a staged drama.

still as a bush in that dry, windless heat.

chewing her asparagus again and again in her crooked jaw, the way a goat might,

They died as heroes, their wives as slaves.

Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by the women themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.

every repercussion, every reverberation that clanged down through the years.

It begins with Tyler himself, with the bizarre fact of him. It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler. He was waltzing while the rest of us hopped a jig; he was deaf to the raucous music of our lives, and we were deaf to the serene polyphony of his.

“Amazing!” she’d say. “You see? That pace would never be possible in the public school. You can only do that at home, where you can sit down and really focus, with no distractions.”

Habitual scene

I DIDN’T BELIEVE TYLER would really go to college, that he would ever abandon the mountain to join the Illuminati.

Character POV

I ran until the sound of blood pulsing in my ears was louder than the thoughts in my head;

It would be many years before I would understand what leaving that day had cost him, and how little he had understood about where he was going.

Looking ahead

SUMMER WANED, SEEMING TO evaporate in its own heat.

After the first she came home sickly and pale, as if bringing that life into the world had taken a measure of her own.

skilled,

Subjective

If I was skeptical, my skepticism was not entirely my fault. It was the result of my not being able to decide which of my mothers to trust.

a great iron glacier breaking apart.

Who put out the fire?

Unknown circumstances

I wore jeans, a large gray T-shirt, and steel-toed boots; the other girls wore black leotards and sheer, shimmering skirts, white tights and tiny ballet shoes the color of taffy.

Image to show her difference

The other girls rarely spoke to me, but I loved being there with them. I loved the sensation of conformity. Learning to dance felt like learning to belong.

Same

flashing cameras and bulky camcorders.

Setting the scene and showing the time period

Nothing had ever felt so natural; it was as if I thought the sound, and by thinking it brought it into being.

Chevy Astro van

Same

It is a relief when the van finally leaves the road.

The acceptance of his behavior as normal

I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.

Perfect description of abuse

there was something in me, something like what was in the prophets, and that it was not male or female, not old or young; a kind of worth that was inherent and unshakable.

Perhaps reality was not wholly volatile. Perhaps it could be explained, predicted.

I could not self-teach trigonometry.

Same level that stopped me

Someone said Dad moved the boom unexpectedly and Shawn pitched over the edge.

Another story with multiple versions

Mother said I was the only one who could calm him, and I persuaded myself that that was true. Who better? I thought. He doesn’t affect me.

Abuse mindset

I would remain a child, in perpetuity, always, or I would lose him.

Foreshadowing

I heard Dad’s step on the stairwell. Mother sighed and her eyes fluttered, as if she were coming out of a trance.

Purely observed behavior that shows subtext

That was their world. I stepped into overalls and returned to mine.

Clothing again used to distinguish her

Fifteen minutes later they were there, and the three of us waited awkwardly together, me chewing my fingernails on a pastel-blue sofa, Mother pacing and clicking her fingers, and Dad sitting motionless beneath a loud wall clock.

Image

After that night, there was never any question of whether I would go or stay. It was as if we were living in the future, and I was already gone.

Looking ahead

I am not sorry, merely ashamed.

He said I’d been educated according to a rigorous program designed by my mother, who’d made sure I met all the requirements to graduate.

The inevitability of lying about your education

“It proves one thing at least,” he said. “Our home school is as good as any public education.”

Familiar and infuriating refrain

I bought my own copy, hoping it would teach me about history or literature, but it didn’t. It couldn’t, because I was unable to distinguish between the fictional story and the factual backdrop. Napoleon felt no more real to me than Jean Valjean. I had never heard of either.

something called the “essay form,” which, she assured us, we had learned in high school.