Educated By Tara Westover Book Review — Stella Inabo
The story of Tara Westover was for me both riveting and extremely sad. She wrote the memoir well, she drew me in with the way she described Idaho and even the fractured world around her.
Tara was born to Mormon parents who were peculiar because of her dad’s paranoia and his bipolar disorder. Her mother vacillated between been a woman with her own opinion when her husband was not close-by to a wife that supported everything that her husband did whether it was right or wrong. Among the Westover children , Tara only talks extensively about Shawn and Tyler, I almost forgot her elder sister Audrey existed.
Tara’s memoir follows her growth from a confused child to a harassed teenage girl to a woman who found herself at the expense of her family. It was almost painful for me to readas she struggled with shedding years of pain and lies (told by her father). She understood that he did not tell these lies because he was a bad person but because he was very delusional. In protecting his family he actually hurt them.
She escaped the near death experiences of working with her father, her mother’s inability to help her, her own doubt about her intelligence and her brother’s abusive behavior through education. Not the classroom learning, but actually opening up her mind to the things that were new or different and considering them herself. Tara for the first time thought for herself and that was what liberated her and that was what estranged her from her father. She found a new family in the relatives that her family had also cut off.
Tara calls this growth and change ‘an education’ I think for me this is the most powerful phrase in the book. This story is painful and beautiful at the same time. To gain something she lost something. This well written memoir is a book I would recommend for any book lover.
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