Educated

by Tara Westover

Dad waved his Bible and explained the sinfulness

of milk.

There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.

Then he used a word I’d never heard before: Illuminati.

Dad stood, looking at the active power lines, looking at the earth, looking at Mother. Looking helpless. “Do you think—should I call an ambulance?”

“College is extra school for people too dumb to learn the first time around,”

Tyler said they contained his pencil shavings from the past five years, which he had collected to make fire starters for our “head for the hills” bags.

occasionally she was possessed of her old enthusiasm. On those days, when the family was gathered around the table, eating breakfast, Mother would announce that today we were doing school.

have no idea what my siblings did when they did school, but when I did it I opened my math book and spent ten minutes turning pages, running my fingers down the center fold. If my finger touched fifty pages, I’d report to Mother that I’d done fifty pages of math.

Many memories might be summoned to symbolize this period of our lives, but this is the one that has stayed with me: of Dad’s voice rising up from the floor while Tyler drinks his tacos.

Sometimes, when I was stripping copper from a radiator or throwing the five hundredth chunk of steel into the bin, I’d find myself imagining the classrooms where Tyler was spending his days. My interest grew more acute with every deadening hour

The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

Eventually. But it’ll leave a nasty scar.”

“You’ve damaged your kidney,” she said. “We’d better make a fresh batch of juniper and mullein flower.”

him for what felt like hours, but he didn’t look up, so I blurted out what I’d come to say: “I want to go to school.” He seemed not to have heard me.

I remember laughing the whole hour. Dad lay on the kitchen floor cracking jokes about an ordinance that had recently passed in our little farming village. A stray dog had bitten a boy and everyone was up in arms. The mayor had decided to limit dog ownership to two dogs per family, even though the attacking dog hadn’t belonged to anybody at all.

“These genius socialists,” Dad said. “They’d drown staring up at the rain if you didn’t build a roof over them.” I laughed so hard at that my stomach ached.

Dad wouldn’t put aside the great battle he was fighting against the Illuminati long enough to say, “Yes, God has blessed us, we’re very blessed.” It was as if, when I sang, Dad forgot for a moment that the world was a frightening place, that it would corrupt me, that I should be kept safe, sheltered, at home. He wanted my voice to be heard.

I’d never learned how to talk to people who weren’t like us—people who went to school and visited the doctor.

If I didn’t have anything to say, at least Annie did.

I’d go outside every morning and stand in the sun with my mouth open—let those rays seep in for a half hour or so. They’ll shrink in no time.” He called it a treatment. I did it for a month.

The wind is furious, the view out the window pure white. Richard pulls over. He says we can’t go any further.

Dad grins. “I’m not driving faster than our angels can fly.” The van is still accelerating. To fifty, then to sixty.

We were outside the city—there was nothing but a truck stop and red sand stretching out in all directions—so we ate Cheetos and played Mario Kart in the sleeper.

“Siddle Lister,” Shawn might say, “we should pay a-eleven-tion. There’s a checkpoint ahead and I can’t a-five-d a ticket. Time three put on your seatbelt.”

Dad told Shawn to take a break. Luke and Benjamin helped him prop himself against the pickup, then went back to work.

Her gaze shifted to me. I hadn’t felt its strength in years and I was stunned by it. “Of all my children,” she said, “you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze. I didn’t expect it from Tyler—that was a surprise—but you. Don’t you stay. Go. Don’t let anything stop you from going.” I heard Dad’s step on the stairwell. Mother sighed and her eyes fluttered, as if she were coming out of a trance.

We were silent. My heart pounded in my chest. “I turned sixteen in September,” I said. “Oh.” Mother bit her lip, then she stood and smiled. “Well, don’t worry about it then. You can stay. Don’t know what your dad was thinking, really. I guess we forgot. Hard to keep track of how old you kids are.”

Shannon moved to the sink and I saw the word “Juicy” written across her rear. That was more than I could take. I backed away toward my room, mumbling that I was going to bed.

“If there’s no scholarship, there’s no scholarship,” he said. “Maybe I can help with the money. We’ll figure it out. Just be happy, okay?” “Okay,” I said. “Come on home if you need.” I hung up, not sure what I’d just heard. I knew it wouldn’t last, that the next time we spoke everything would be different, the tenderness of this moment forgotten, the endless struggle between us again in the foreground. But tonight he wanted to help. And that was something.

he talked about football and popular bands more than the End of Days;

shouted to Shawn when the purlins were clean. He appeared from behind an I-beam and raised his welding shield. When he saw me, his face broke into a wide smile. “Our Nigger’s back!” he said.

The next name was Martin Luther King Jr. I had never seen his face before, or heard his name, and it was several minutes before I understood that Dr. Kimball didn’t mean Martin Luther, who I had heard of.

I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.

that never again would I allow myself to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.

We met one final time, in a field off the highway. Buck’s Peak loomed over us. He said he loved me but this was over his head. He couldn’t save me. Only I could. I had no idea what he was talking about.

I write what I remember: There was one point when he was forcing me from the car, that he had both hands pinned above my head and my shirt rose up. I asked him to let me fix it but it was like he couldn’t hear me. He just stared at it like a great big jerk. It’s a good thing I’m as small as I am. If I was larger, at that moment, I would have torn him apart.

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.

Was I pregnant? I wasn’t sure. I considered every interaction I’d had with a boy, every glance, every touch. I walked to the mirror and raised my shirt, then ran my fingers across my abdomen, examining it inch by inch and thought, Maybe. I had never kissed a boy.

Shawn was twenty-eight; Emily was a senior in high school.

The government, it seemed, had never been in the habit of murdering people for not submitting their children to a public education. This seemed so obvious to me now, it was difficult to understand why I had ever believed anything else.

“I’d like to hear more about them classes,” he rasped one morning near the end of the summer. “It sounds real interesting.” It felt like a new beginning.

I might have told him everything right then: that my family didn’t believe in modern medicine; that we were treating the burn at home with salves and homeopathy; that it had been terrifying, worse than terrifying; that for as long as I lived I would never forget the smell of charred flesh. I could have told him all that, could have surrendered the weight, let the relationship carry it and grow stronger. Instead I kept the burden for myself, and my friendship with Nick, already anemic, underfed and underused, dwindled in obsolescence.

before, they had been employees; now they were followers.

“I’m just standing,” I said. “You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.” “The way it is nothing to you,” he said.

I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement—since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others.

After I’d been meeting with Professor Steinberg for a month, he suggested I write an essay comparing Edmund Burke with Publius, the persona under which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay had written The Federalist Papers.

“I have been teaching in Cambridge for thirty years,” he said. “And this is one of the best essays I’ve read.”

I thought again of Anna Mathea, wondering what kind of world it was in which she, following a prophet, could leave her lover, cross an ocean, enter a loveless marriage as a second mistress, then bury her first child, only to have her granddaughter, in two generations, cross the same ocean an unbeliever. I was Anna Mathea’s heir: she had given me her voice. Had she not given me her faith, also? —

It’s astonishing that I used to believe all this without the slightest suspicion, I wrote. The whole world was wrong; only Dad was right.