The thirteenth book that I’ve finished reading this year is Tara Westover’s “Educated”. Thanks R?for recommending. Born in a Mormon household and raised in the mountains of Idaho, Tara spent the first sixteen years of her life not in school, but in the junkyard scrapping for her father, in the kitchen helping her mother prepare food, and in various industrial projects under her father’s supervision. When she finally achieved an ideal score on her second try of the ACT, she enrolled in Brigham Young University and started there her academic career in history, which eventually extends to Trinity College, Cambridge, and Harvard. What has she gained from her education, and what has she lost?

In my opinion, the core of this book is not about the process of gaining intellectual education, but rather about the journey of re-establishing a self-identity that breaks away from one’s family obligations. The majority of this book has been stifling to read; the endless string of accidents, from mother’s ‘raccoon eyes’ to Luke’s burning leg, then to the injuries that affected Shawn and Dad forever, formed a recurring reminder of the horrors in the family, of the belief that injuries should be left in God’s hands rather than be intervened by men, as well as misogynistic remarks about how women should be kept in the kitchen and submit to their husbands. The physical and mental abuse that Tara received from her family also reminded me of those in experienced by Marianne in “Normal People” (Sally Rooney), though perhaps in a more severe form. It is a devastating process to be torn from one’s roots, to be distrusted and backstabbed by family members and to reconstruct one’s self image and social network. Tara is courageous to lay that all out bare, showing her deepest vulnerabilities to the world.

On the other hand, one wonders what Tara would like the audience to take away from her memoir. Most of the story describes the love-hate relationship between her family and herself, the tumults she’s gone through, the dissolution of her belief in her father’s convictions, the pity she feels for her mother’s transformation from a reasonable person who insisted on maintaining education at home (compared to her dad who always called his children to help him out in the junkyard) to a woman who refuses to meet anyone who does not welcome her husband. Less is said about her journey of intellectual education, of how she emboldened herself through knowledge, and how she came to terms with the chasm between her family and herself, which I am more curious about. Consequently, the story seems to end on an abrupt note, since the transition from her frantic mental state to her final calmness was not described in detail. I also feel that there is a victimising tone that underlies her tale; this is not to say that her sufferings are not valid, but such a tone creates a bitter feeling in the reader, as if inviting the reader to take sides with her in her struggles, which arouses my instinct to back away and appraise the situation with more objective lens as I do not want to come to a conclusion when swamped by emotions. Thus, my question comes back to Tara’s purpose of publishing this story: does she want to show readers a less conventional way (yet another possibility) of obtaining an education, or does she want to vent her miseries and evoke sympathetic responses as well as admiration for her ability to excel under such excruciating circumstances? I will leave that for you to find out.