Book Review
Educated (by Tara Westover)
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- But the book is not a sob story. Tara Westover has an indomitable will to overcome her circumstances. She teaches herself algebra, takes the ACT, is miraculously admitted to Brigham Young University, which she attends and feels little assimilated, and in the process, completely revises her worldviews. Education, it turns out, is at the root of sanity. It tells her that the world is not run by pagans. It teaches her about Martin Luther King. She surmises her father might have schizophrenia. Education takes her to the most elite institutions of the world. But no matter how educated she becomes, Westover cannot escape her past, which comes back to haunt her. Her sociopathic brother is keen as ever to abuse her. The book ends on a stilted note with no closure, a portmanteau of her clashing, inconsistent past and futures.
- At times, I found myself wondering why a stirring life story was becoming a novel, with the emphasis on the antagonist (brother), the protagonist, a plot, a climax, and so on. Yet I couldn’t help but marvel at the structure of the book in spite of these artifacts. Each chapter is organized around a theme, a certain character or idea like religion. Collectively, the book is in chronological order, but each chapter is a set of rich, detail-oriented anecdotes that exemplifies that theme.
- Even the sentence-level writing is sumptuous. There are so many wonderful aspects to it, but here are just a few:
- The Metaphor — “an elegant deception, a mental pirouette”
- The sharp shooter; her sentences are summary and straight to the point
- The rich emotional detail, the vivid imagery of the surroundings (scene-setting)
- The omission of some parts of a phrase because the human mind can infer what’s missing
- The different sentence styles; some dialogues; some narrations; some complete anecdotes; the crisp sentences dry as bone
- The analysis combined with the metaphor, e.g. “finally, succumbing to either the woman’s desperation or to Dad’s elation, or to both, Mother gave way.”
- The concision; “as best he could”
- The “summing up” of stories at the end in a pithy sentence: “never again would I allow myself to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand”
- The Metaphor — “an elegant deception, a mental pirouette”
- I will take many things from Educated that I wish to integrate in my memoir. I will not take the novelistic structure. But I imagine the emotions, experiences, and belief-shaping processes to be at the center of my story. This is the beauty of Westover’s book. It makes one imagine their own. Educated has set the yardstick for memoirs and I will hitherto be disappointed by many a read. At some point, I should sit down and take notes on this book.
Here’s a dialogue where some of her writing skill is apparent:
A few weeks after Christmas, the University of Cambridge wrote to Dr. Kerry, rejecting my application. “The competition was very steep,” Dr. Kerry told me when I visited his office. (quote interspersed with narration)
I thanked him and stood to go. (“stood to go” concision)
“One moment,” he said. “Cambridge instructed me to write if I felt there were any gross injustices.”
I didn’t understand, so he repeated himself. “I could only help one student,” he said. “They have offered you a place, if you want it.” (again, narration interspersed with quote)