Educated

by Tara Westover

I suppose I was in shock, but whether it was the shock of learning about something horrific, or the shock of learning about my own ignorance, I’m not sure.

It had never lessened the pain, not one degree. Because of this, I had come to respect pain, even revere it, as necessary and untouchable.

Exactly

shell—in that girl made vacant by the fiction of invincibility—there

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

Uncertainty

I talked and he listened, drawing the shame from me like a healer draws infection from a wound.

That their marriage would be manipulative and violent, I had no doubt—although those words were not mine. They had been given to me by the bishop, and I was still trying to wrest meaning from them.

I was an incurious student that semester. Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars.

I wonder now if the day I set out to steal that tax return wasn’t the first time I left home to go to Buck’s Peak.

began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.

I thought about rushing to my room to change out of the sweatshirt and Keds I was wearing, but I had nothing to change into.

Her clothing seperates her again

I couldn’t tell him that the reason I couldn’t return to Cambridge was that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life.

I had fixated on clothes as the symbol of why I didn’t, and couldn’t, belong.

Illustrated throughout the book

You should be telling people that’s what done it: home school.”

Aaaaaaah

I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.

Uncertainty

Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge.

Same

What was needed—what Emily needed—was a woman emancipated from pretense, a woman who could show herself to be a man. Voice an opinion. Take action in scorn of deference. A father.

Somehow, it had never occurred to me that my sister might have lived my life before I did.

Maybe, she said. But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way.

Her father too

her hair flowing, long and silver.

The symbol of his abuse emily and the dream

I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived.

In that moment part of me believed, as I had always believed, that it would be me who broke the spell, who caused it to break. When the stillness shattered and his fury rushed at me, I would know that something I had done was the catalyst, the cause. There is hope in such a superstition; there is the illusion of control.

the strange sorcery of physics that I still believed had saved me.

a soft cashmere sweater.

Clothes again

There was little hope of overpowering the history my father and sister were creating for me.

The false histories and futures created by different characters throughout

I began to defer, always, to the judgment of others. If Drew remembered something differently than I did, I would immediately concede the point. I began to rely on Drew to tell me the facts of our lives. I took pleasure in doubting myself about whether we’d seen a particular friend last week or the week before, or whether our favorite crêperie was next to the library or the museum. Questioning these trivial facts, and my ability to grasp them, allowed me to doubt whether anything I remembered had happened at all.

Uncertainty

Seeing sunshine, I suspected rain. I felt a relentless desire to ask people to verify whether they were seeing what I was seeing. Is this book blue? I wanted to ask. Is that man tall?

Same

But that was years away.

Looking ahead

All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.

The question of truth

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.

Truth

The dream had been of home.

She has nightmares about her parents too

Wadi Rum,

Everywhere she goes is somewhere i have also been

there was something nourishing in setting aside that time each week, in the act of admitting that I needed something I could not provide for myself.

I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.

Wow

What followed was very dramatic. But the real drama had already played out in the bathroom. It had played out when, for reasons I don’t understand, I was unable to climb through the mirror and send out my sixteen-year-old self in my place. Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed—how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance—I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house. That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. 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.

Certain footnotes have been included to give a voice to memories that differ from mine. The

Truth and uncertainty

We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories. Nothing has revealed that truth to me more than writing this memoir—trying to pin down the people I love on paper, to capture the whole meaning of them in a few words, which is of course impossible. This is the best I can do: to tell that other story next to the one I remember.