Author: Tara Westover
Title: Educated: A Memoir
Random House, 2018. 334 pages.
Reviewed by David Harris, Oct. 20, 2018
This book adds yet another chapter to the growing and increasingly varied corpus of Mormon experience, which is made up of numerous works of fiction, memoir, theology, sociology, religion and personal essays. Westover grew up in rural Idaho and seems to have no connections to the Sunstone / Dialogue community from which a lot of Mormon writing and scholarship comes. This makes the book an intriguing departure from what is available from that community, and I’m glad I ran across it.
Coincidentally, I happened to read this book right after reading Blair Hurley’s The Devoted. Though that book is fiction and this one is a memoir, there are some interesting superficial similarities between the two stories. First, both deal with daughters who disappoint their families by rejecting their respective faith traditions. Secondly, both portray situations where an abuser uses religion to take advantage of his victim. And finally, in both books, after making valiant attempts to maintain their relationships with their respective families, both protagonists eventually break off ties completely in order to assert their right to choose their own way forward in the world and to be the person they themselves choose to be on their own terms.
Toward the beginning of this book, I was tempted to stop reading a number of times because the portrayal of the author’s father with his grandiose delusions and his ignorant religious and political notions quickly became tiresome. And it was also difficult to dredge up much sympathy for his meek and overly submissive wife, who consistently placed deference to her egomaniacal husband on a higher level than the needs of her own children. I never changed my mind about either of the parents, but I became much more interested in the book once the author got old enough to begin to chafe against some of their ridiculous rules and attitudes.
Overly regimented piety can drive children away from religion faster than just about anything else. I saw that in real life in a couple of families while I was growing up both in Provo and in Fresno, California in the 1970s. In one of the families, the parents would ring a bell very early in the morning every day to call the kids in to scripture study. Another bell signaled breakfast, and yet another morning prayer. As you might imagine, not many of those children have any interest in religion today.
The parents portrayed in this book, however, are not that well organized. They don’t send their children to school, and they are generally neglectful of their welfare, failing even to teach them such basic principles as washing their hands after going to the bathroom. The father risks their welfare by exposing them to dangerous working conditions in a junkyard, and several members of the family, including the father himself, are seriously injured there and in two auto accidents which were perfectly avoidable if the parents had only taken the responsibility to create safe driving conditions for their long-distance family car trips.
They also fail to protect their younger children from an abusive older brother. Even when faced with direct evidence of his violent temperament, they refuse to admit that the abuse is going on, let alone step into protect the other children. Interestingly, they view their children’s complaints as evidence of a lack of moral fiber and of devotion to the Church on the part of those children.
One question that kept arising in my mind as I was reading was how much I could trust the author given that I was only hearing her point of view. However, her stories are backed up by three of her siblings as well as others outside her family. Plus she has been recording her experience in journals from the time she was a girl, in some cases writing from multiple points of view a day or two apart but, according to her, never having destroyed conflicting accounts written down previously.
Apparently, Westover wrote her dissertation at Cambridge on perceptions of family loyalty and the lack thereof, and she included nineteenth-century sources both of Mormon and of non-Mormon thinking in her research. In the case of these two books (Educated and The Devoted), that loyalty centers on a specific flavor of religious devotion, and it’s generally enforced with threats of family abandonment if not outright violence. However, family loyalty or tribal loyalty based on religion, ethnicity or political affiliation, can be a destructive force in society in other ways, as well. We’ve seen that in Iraq in the years since Saddam Hussein was overthrown, and we’re seeing it more and more in our own country as Republicans and Democrats become ever more firmly entrenched in opposition to even the most basic forms of coöperation across the aisle.
I mention this to make it clear that family loyalty for the sake of itself is not necessarily always a positive thing. Populism is just family loyalty on a large scale, and there’s nothing particularly useful about movements like White Power or Black Power, the Aryan Nations Church or the Jewish Defense League, or America First, groups which promote individuals or groups above others based on their ethnic or religious or national identity. Not to mention movements like ISIS, which view anyone who believes differently than they do as legitimate targets for murder and sexual enslavement.
I’m very interested to see what is next for this author. I’d love to see her combine her unique life’s experience with her academic studies in philosophy and religion into one or more compelling works of fiction. The works of such authors as Levi Peterson, John Bennion and others, largely set in rural environments in the American West and touching on Mormonism, come to mind as good models for one or more novels or short stories.
Another possibility might be a book of essays on theology as it is viewed by Mormons from all walks of life, both academic and non-academic, and how it translates into daily life for them. I’d be very interested in reading such a book, but I’m one of those who find the language of philosophy and theology tedious and very difficult to parse. A set of essays which navigate the intricacies of this difficult topic for laymen like me would be a very welcome addition to the catalogue of writings about Mormonism in my view.