Educated

by Tara Westover

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 tranquility 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.

I knew people could go crazy—they’d wear dead cats on their heads or fall in love with a turnip—but the notion that a person could be functional, lucid, persuasive, and something could still be wrong, had never occurred to me.

In the Days of Abomination, this won’t be worth a thing. People will trade hundred-dollar bills for a roll of toilet paper.”

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.

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

But here was a principle through which the dimensions of life could be defined, captured. Perhaps reality was not wholly volatile. Perhaps it could be explained, predicted. Perhaps it could be made to make sense.

I knelt on the carpet, listening to my father but studying this stranger, and felt suspended between them, drawn to each, repelled by both.

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 willfully or accidentally ignorant.

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 from somewhere inside that brittle shell—in that girl made vacant by the fiction of invincibility—there was a spark left.

There was a boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out either the one page or the other. 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.

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.

It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you,

He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.

This caused a kind of crisis in me. My love of music, and my desire to study it, had been compatible with my idea of what a woman is. My love of history and politics and world affairs was not. And yet they called to me.

it’s as if you’ve been on this roof all your life.”

I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected—a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality.

There were wonderful suppositions embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble.

felt exposed by the elegance and yet somehow made invisible by it.

Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you.

In you. You are gold.

or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lig...

“The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you,”

“She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”

positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.

felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman.

There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing.

I did not yet understand that it was this fact of being tender—of having lived some years of a life that allowed tenderness—that would, finally, save me.

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.

What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.

I could stay, and search for what had been home, or I could go, now, before the walls shifted and the way out was shut.

This was the moment she had realized how much easier it was to walk away: what a poor trade it was to swap your family for a single sister.

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.

They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.

You could call this selfhood many things.

I call it an ed...

did so because I agree with historian Diane McWhorter that “to sanitize the language of segregation is to mute its destructive force.”

It is to dismiss or downplay. I believe that to respect our past, and those who suffered in it, we have to at least try see it the way it was.

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,