Educated by Tara Westover

This book was insane. INSANE. I know everyone and their mom has read this lately, and it is really big. And that is for a reason--it is really, really well written, and a really, really compelling story about the author's childhood living in a rural Idaho town and being raised without going to school or having any sort of education at all, then going to college and learning about what the world was like outside of her home. She was raised by some survivalist, almost fundamentalist Mormons who were extremely anti-government, anti-doctor, and believed in the literal end of the world, and spent all their time canning food for the end of the world. Besides that, Tara was taught extreme and terrible things about women and their place in the home and the reasons for modesty (her dad and brother regularly called her a whore) and her brother eventually started being abusive and violent towards her as she got older. She eventually got into college after teaching herself enough math to be able to pass the ACT, and went to BYU and eventually began to realize how much she'd learned as a child was wrong--or nonexistent. She raised her hand in her first week of class and asked what the Holocaust was. She'd never heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., or the civil rights movement, and she didn't know that she had textbooks to buy or read for each class. Her adjustment to college was very difficult, but she eventually went on and earned a PhD from Harvard and Cambridge.

This book was incredibly difficult to listen to and just mind-blowing in its effects. It wasn't depressing by any means--she wrote very evenly about all of these very difficult and sometimes dangerous experiences of her childhood, and you can tell that she is being as honest as possible about what happened to her by examining what she really experienced and what she believes. It is just so eye-opening about how warped and twisted people's minds can be by what they are taught--that's one of the main things she says she realized and what she tries to study as she became a historian: how do we know what is really history when all we really know is what others tell us? I thought that was such a fascinating thought. She is one of seven children, and some of her siblings have totally followed the ways of their parents with no education and no desire to know anything about the outside world, while three of them have escaped and gone to college and moved farther out from their tiny world that their father tried to enclose around them in their childhood.

I was very moved by this book and by everything I learned from it. And I am so grateful that I was not born into a family that is remotely like that. I kept thinking that I hoped that people reading this would know that this family is the extreme of the extreme--not at all like the values that our Church teaches. The worst of the worst. I would love to read this one and talk about it for book club.