Educated – Tara Westover’s account of growing up traumatized.

Psychology of Educated.  Psychoanalysis of Educated.  Tara Westover, Educated, Trauma.

Educated is a memoir about trauma.  It was recommended by a friend and, if it had been described in that way, I don’t think I would have read it.  Reading about trauma is enough to make me blanch because, for a psychoanalyst, reading about trauma is a busman’s holiday.  Though we are drawn to the work in this field because of our interest in the human condition in its manifold forms, our work involves helping people make sense out of aspects of their lives that don’t make sense – and the experience of being traumatized is disruptive of everything sensible, especially when you are traumatized by people you love.  And a lot of what we work with intimately is the downstream effects of trauma, especially intimate, family based trauma.

Because the book was described as an incredibly well written memoir that speaks to the power of education (which it is); without quite knowing what we were getting into, the reluctant wife and I agreed to read this book together – actually I read it out loud to her at night as we were preparing to sleep.  We both recoiled from the story that is told – and sometimes we took a break for a while to let the last bit subside before we picked up the next harrowing chapter.  I kept asking her if we should stop (though we have both worked with traumatized folks, we have a low tolerance for traumatic literature and film and hers is a bit lower than mine), but her response was that “it is like watching a car wreck – I can’t bear to watch it, but somehow I also can’t look away.”

We couldn’t look away because Tara Westover is, indeed, a tremendous writer.  And how this came to be is a little hard to understand – she had no formal education to speak of until she went off to college – more about that later.  She is the seventh of seven children – the second girl - who grew up on the Westover’s family home on the side of a mountain - Buck’s Peak - in the middle of nowhere Idaho.  Because the family is living largely off the grid (so much so that Tara does not have a birth certificate and does not know her actual birthday), the mountain itself is a character, looming over her family, watching out for them, providing space for them to work in and to retreat into.  Yes, they live on the side of a paved highway.  Yes, there is a nearby town.  Yes, they shop there and one set of her grandparents live there and Tara even, against her father’s wishes, works at the grocery store for a while, but I think her pull is towards the mountain, away from civilization – as her true home.

The Westovers are a strict Mormon family.  They are also preparing for the “end of days” by stockpiling necessary supplies and they believe that the government – indeed all institutions of modern America, especially medicine – are the enemy and that the outside world should be avoided as much as possible so that the family can live a self-sufficient life and live by the Mormon code as they interpret it.  And they interpret it in idiosyncratic ways.

I don’t know the relationship between how the family practices Mormonism and Mormonism in general.  Westover could help us with that – she ends up being a scholar of Mormonism – but that would break the thread of the story.  This book is not about the practice of Mormonism – it is about a particular family functioning in a particular way.  And it is about Tara’s place in that family with the rules that are defined by the family – and by her father as the leader of that family.  I think it is important that the rules bear some relationship to an extant set of rules governing family relations- and Tara ends up studying the ways that the rules of Mormonism are tied into other nineteenth century doctrines of the family, but as a child, she has so little contact with the outside world that she (and we, as we hear her working to remember the world through the eyes of the child she was) conceptualize the world as defined by her family and their rules.  We see, pretty quickly, that her Dad is crazy, and we wonder how much of what he is saying is consistent with organized religion and how much is an expression of his craziness.  This is because we cannot only look through Tara’s eyes (which very dimly and over a long period of time recognize his craziness) any more than we can only see the world through our patient’s eyes – we necessarily see what she is seeing by passing that through our own conception of it as well.  Indeed, the author herself, while trying to remember what it looked like as a child is also necessarily seeing what she is seeing from her position as the adult author who has her own perspective on what she was seeing – and she wants us to see what she has seen in ways that are different from what she was seeing – she wants us to know both that she didn’t know that it was crazy, and she wants us to recoil from the craziness of it all.

There are two villains in this story whose sins are acts of commission and two whose acts are those of omission – or perhaps acts of aiding and abetting.  The primary villain is Westover’s father.  His malice is largely based, at least initially, on a complete and utter lack of empathy for others and a subsequent disregard for even the slightest of safety measures.  His Mormonism is a very egocentric view of a God that is looking out for him as a saved individual, so he, weirdly, does not have to look out for himself or his children.  He is scratching out a living by salvaging metal from old cars and other scrap but also by building barns and other outbuildings on the cheap, and this means cutting corners and using child labor.  All of this is dangerous work – it involves working with huge machinery that tears metal apart, working with volatile chemicals like the gasoline left in the tanks of the cars that are being dismembered, and, in the case of the construction, working on roofs and lifting heavy objects into the sky with a rickety old forklift rather than by using a people lifter.  And children are doing work that grown men would not do without basic safety equipment like hard hats and automatic shut offs.  This means that there are a lot of injuries – most of which – all but the most severe – are treated with disdain or, at most, an herbal tincture made by Tara's mother because of a basic mistrust of the governmental and medical establishment and a deep faith in the direct impact of God and his creations - the tinctures - on the individuals in the family.

The primary way in which her father is a villain is more insidious though.  He is misogynistic – but this is articulated as a defense against the overwhelming power of female sexuality that must be, literally, covered up and prevented from being expressed at all costs.  This results in a code that seems crazy to a reader outside of the culture, but also to other Mormons when Tara finally makes it out of her family and into BYU.  But within the family, all sin emanates from women.  This means that the true villain, Tara’s brother, who consistently berates her, beats her, chokes her and leaves her fearing for her life on multiple occasions is exonerated from all wrong doing – indeed, her father blames Tara when she calls the issue, and her father bans her from the family when she refuses an exorcism that he offers her to free her of the devil that is leading her to accuse her brother.

Her brother Shawn, then, is the perpetrator of most of the intentional horrific threats that Tara and her sister and later Shawn’s wife survive.   When the family is in not one but two car wrecks that almost kill them because they are driving in unsafe conditions without seat belts because, according to her father, the protective angels can outrun any harm that might befall them – the danger seems chaotic and awful, but not primarily malicious, simply crazy.  When her brother, whom Tara regards initially with devotion, twists her wrist so hard that she passes out from the pain ostensibly because she is using make up and talking to a boy and is therefore a whore, but more immediately to demonstrate his dominance over her and others and as a channel for an otherworldly rage, and when he berates and demeans his girlfriend in High School, we are confronted by a particular kind of cruelty – the cruelty of a bully who is intentionally making others subservient to him and who is doing this to consolidate his apparent power and might.  He apparently thrives in a family system that exonerates him, but that also, through failing to confront these behaviors, leads him deeper and deeper into fits of rage that he cannot control. 

When Tara calls him on his behavior as an adult and he threatens to kill her or to hire someone to do that, we fear for her life – but we also see that he is exposed as a weakling who cannot tolerate being questioned.  In one of the many many brutal moments in this book, but one that feels all the more brutal because Tara has all but gotten herself out of the system only to reenter it – when Tara asks her father to rein Shawn in, Shawn arrives for a meeting (in the presence of her mother and father) that Tara did not want and is not prepared for and hands her a knife covered in blood and encourages her to use it on herself so that he doesn’t have to.  What she doesn’t know until later is that the blood comes from Shawn's favorite dog whom he has just killed with the knife in a fit of rage when he is called to the meeting by his father.  What is implicit but never stated is that killing Tara would lead him to lose the support of their father – this would not be forgiven – so he must vent his rage elsewhere and use intimidation to try to get her back in line – something that she is finally unwilling to do.  Meanwhile her mother and father engage in more and more convoluted logic and rewriting of history to change what they observed happening between the two of them.

So, the sins of omission are committed by Tara’s mother, but also by her sister.  They both collude with her father, pretending when talking with Tara that they will stand up to him and demand that he put a stop to Shawn’s behavior, but when push comes to shove, they cave, and join with their father in repudiating Tara.  This failure to support her leaves Tara teetering on the edge of madness.  Unable to accept her father’s reality, and feeling betrayed by her attempts to assert her own, she retreats into a world of binge watching terrible television.  But I am getting ahead of the story.

The hero of this story is clearly Tara.  Despite living in her father’s world and following his code in large measure without question, she senses a broader world and seeks it out.  When she is a teenager, she discovers that she has a good singing voice and performs against her father’s prohibition to publicly display herself – confident that he will both come to her performances and be proud of her – which he does and is.  She also seeks out other opportunities to connect with people in town – and then, eventually, she applies to BYU.  She does this without a lick of schooling.  As one of her brothers who has gotten out says - tell them you've been home-schooled, they won't know better.  And, later, when she is given the grant to study overseas, her father is puzzled that she doesn't credit her homeschooling as the foundation that got her there.

Tara has been taught at home how to midwife and mix herbal tinctures by following her mother around and “learning” from her, though Tara’s description of her mother’s wisdom is jaded – she describes her mother making decisions about what treatment to prescribe – indeed what ails people – based on "muscle testing" which involves asking a question and seeing how her body responds to it.  She has learned to walk on tall structures without fear from her father, and she has learned from her older brother how to study like mad on his own to be able to apply to school.  She follows his lead, takes the ACT and is admitted to BYU, where she is a fish out of water.  Despite not having the first notion of how to study or having a context in which to put information, she is able to build a network of knowledge and move from barely hanging on to functioning reasonably well in a college setting – and writing well enough to get the attention of and be accepted into a fellowship at Oxford college.  This, in turn, leads to a Gates scholarship to Cambridge and then admission into a PhD program at Harvard in history, though she earned her Ph.D. from Cambridge.

Her memoir, then, is the product of a classically trained historian.  A historian who is aware of the pitfalls of constructing a history.  It is a history with central elements that are remembered very differently by the key players who were part of them (and she footnotes some of these incidents, noting the differing memories of each participant).  Tara does, I think, a masterful job of describing her lived experience, and working to articulate what happened in her life in as balanced a manner as I can imagine such a thing being done.  She does this with the help of numerous heroes.  The first of these is John Stuart Mill – a proto feminist whom she reads when she still thinks of feminist as the worst kind of insult.  She also reads Mary Wallstonecraft, and then numerous more modern feminists and begins to identify with them.

On the home front, the older brother whom she watched study and get out of the house refuses to repudiate her – and so does an even older brother who also left the family to pursue an education.  So the family ends up split between the three children who have “escaped” through education, and the four who are still dependent on the family business, which has morphed through an interesting, and typically horrific twist.  Her father, working to dismantle one of the cars in the salvage yard, did not take account of the gasoline left in the tank and ignited it with the acetylene torch he was using.  The ensuing explosion severely burns his face, hands and lungs.  He hangs barely balanced between life and death for months – and he is never hospitalized.  Instead, he is treated with his wife’s tinctures and salves.  His survival is seen as a miracle – literally – one that propels her business into a new level.  Her medicines – and her books about them – are now in wide demand, and the family employs not only their children – they have become the largest employer in the valley since the economic downturn – and Tara finds it hard to muster allies even outside the family, except among those who have, for instance, been fired by her father in one of his fits of rage.

Westover is a good writer, but it is still a bit of a mystery how she can write well about trauma.  Freud remarked early in his career that when you take a case history from a “neurotic” you should expect to find gaps in that history.  I believe that Trauma has a toxic effect on people’s ability to remember and articulate their experience.  When this is combined with living in a closed culture, where people are not supposed to tell others about that culture, “tell-alls” frequently become enthralling because of the content of the story, not the way they are told.  In Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about a closed culture– the Scots Irish Appalachian culture – the author, despite being very bright (a Yale Law graduate and successful ex-Marine), tells the story of his culture somewhat flat footedly – I think partly because of unprocessed trauma.  James Cone, an African American theologian, who has deep insights into the American culture, uses the sing song preacher tone – an almost hypnotic – but also hard outer coat approach – to articulating his ideas about the lynching of his people.  Min Jin Lee, a Korean American writing about the suppressed Korean-Japanese in Pachinko, uses the third person omniscient to avoid articulating the thoughts of her heroes – and captures something of their shame at articulating who it is that they are by doing that.  Ta Nehisi Coates, in contrast to these other voices, speaks in a comfortable tone and uses mainstream language to paint a picture of his internal experience that is resonant and full.  But he has been raised with a supportive marginalized family that has facilitated his ability to talk about the trauma that has been done to his people – he does not talk about the toxic effects of trauma felt first hand without a sympathetic ear to help him process it.

While Tara takes the position that she is able to free herself from her family and to write about them in the ways that she does because of her education (and also, a bit, because of helpful psychotherapy), I don’t disagree, but I think that, ironically, it may be that she is able to speak with a voice of calm authority that is closer to Coates' partly because of having been raised within the family that she was.  As crazy as this sounds, I think that Tara’s mother and father loved her.  And I think that she knew this in a very deep and intimate way.  She knew and could count on her father’s love.  She therefore feels deeply betrayed by him when he casts her as the source of evil that she knows she is not, but she also gets (after a great deal of psychology - though she might say historical - work) that this is not the result of the crazy malice that drives her brother, but the crazy organization of the world that drives her father’s view of the world – one that keeps him at the center of that world and blinds him to other viewpoints.  Her mother, despite knowing of Shawn’s behavior towards Tara over the years and being deeply disturbed by it, is caught in the vortex of her husband’s world view – a version of which she came to the marriage pre-steeped in – and one that she chooses over the view that Tara doesn’t have the resources of time and volition to win her over to.  Again, Tara feels betrayed – but, when she has worked hard and long enough to articulate fully her experience – she is also able to experience the range of her parent’s experiences – she is able to remember their humor and their love as well as their failings – as a result of the work that she does to remember all of who it is that they are – and the work that she does to live outside her dependence on them – and through the capacity to reconnect with functional parts of her family – not just her brothers, but also her mother’s brothers and sisters.  Tara is able to come home again.

I can’t stress enough, that part of Tara’s ability to become educated – to think through, reflect on, and move away from her family is because Tara had a home that had certain qualities – a certain rationale - to begin with.  The rationale for what happened to her was crazy, but it was a rationale.  And it was a rationale that had a basis, no matter how tenuous that basis was once it was filtered through her father’s paranoia, in providing a foundation that helped her rebel against the very forces that built that foundation and also trapped her in a body killing, but also a soul killing space.  Her mother is remembered as privately supporting her going to college, “you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze.”  But her mother also did not directly disagree or cross her father.  Her mother’s failure to support her was consistent with the woman that Tara knew her to be – as disappointing as that was.  These people who were here family were complicated, tangled, but reliable people that had her best interests, as best they were able to express them, in mind. 

I think it would be possible to take from this story that the process of creating a narrative is an essential part of healing from trauma.  Again, I don't disagree with that.  In fact, I think that is an important and relevant conclusion.  But I think there is more to this story.  I think that this is also a story about what it takes to develop the capacity to articulate a narrative like this one.  And I think that, as much as we may be troubled by this, it takes not just a strong constitution and brains, but also the good intent of a loving, if misguided, family and/or culture.  Mahatma Gandhi was able to free the state of India because he was able to use the English sense of morality to highlight their immoral actions.  Tara does not accomplish what he does - she does something harder.  She uses the sensible parts of what she learned to distance herself from those that are insensible, and to see them as that, while retaining a sense of who her family was and who it is that she is becoming.  And she knows, as feminists have been knowing for centuries, that the person she is becoming, though unapproved of by the family or the culture represent what is best about the family and the culture - that our goal is to support the kind of becoming that occurs in this book so that our children, whom we may not even recognize, are living out who it is that we could only hope that they will become.

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