Educated

by Tara Westover

Dad would develop fierce opinions about women working, radical even for our rural Mormon community.

thought of my brother as he had been, as I remembered him, as I wanted to remember him. I thought of Albuquerque and Los Angeles, and of the miles of lost interstate in between.

It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.

I had witnessed birth, but I’d been given none of the facts of conception.

couldn’t defend myself, because I didn’t understand the accusation.

I thought the dress was whorish, until she said her father had bought it for her in Paris. A gift from one’s father could not be whorish. A gift from one’s father seemed to me the definitive signal that a woman was not a whore.

You are gold. And returning to BYU, 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 lights—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”

Dad was on track to become the best-funded lunatic in the Mountain West.

is painful to face reality, she wrote. To realize there was something ugly, and I refused to see it.fn2

“Whether I should kill you myself, or hire an assassin.”