Post type: Book review, Date: 05-July-2020, Language: English

Author: Tara Westover

Very few books have touched me so deeply and subtly as this one. This book marks the memories of a homeschooled Mormon girl whose family was preparing for the End of Days, who transforms herself into an academic and Cambridge educated historian.

The incidents and experiences narrated in the book are so harrowing, that there is a good chance that the reader may assume it as cooked-up version of a vastly different story. There was also such a reference made about the book by her parents’ lawyer later on. But, in my opinion, author has tried her best to narrate all different versions whenever her own memories contradicted with how others remembered some incidents.

Then, there is another allegation I saw in some reviews, against the author that it was unbelievable how the author didnt understand the magnitude of manipulation and moral-policing she was facing from Gene (her father) and Shawn (brother). Here, too, I would like to take her side, with the same justification as some of the other reviewers, that it is not unreal for a girl brought up in this kind of a setting to think that this was reality. The book offers an example for this argument in her brother Tyler, who, after having studied science for years, is still unsure about getting his own children vaccinated, because he was trained to think it was evil.

For me, the book actually cemented my understanding that any religion, in its most fundamentalistic form, can make even the sanest people do horrible things to loved ones with banality. In fact, what I felt was wrong in the book is that Tara tries to give some kind of justification to the actions of her father and elder brother Shawn by attributing them to probable mental illnesses. In this way, she partially tries to legitimize their actions, may be in an attempt to love them and reclaim them in her mind as her family. She can also be seen using the same logic in case of her mother, who chats with her about not being a good mother to her. She attributes the fault to the brain injury she gets following the car accident.

It can be seen that all of Shawn’s violence against Tara is based on his belief that women are inferior beings and had to be shown the righteous way by men. A belief that he imbibes from his faith. If at all he was mentally in need of help, I would think that it would only augment the already existing problem in his thought. Several of the instances narrated in the book can be easily empathized by women of every religions around the world, especially in third world countries, where they are held on to, more firmly. Tara mentions in the book that it was not her deeds that made her father and brother call her a “whore”, but her mere existence. It is clear that they had a problem with her existing the way she did. The underlying misogyny in the family becomes clearer when the business that was once owned and administered by her mother, giving her some voice in the family, was taken over by her father as it grew bigger, subduing her again. The way Shawn treats his wife, the strained relation of Tara’s father with both her grandparents also corroborate this.

To add to this, there are several gory accidents that happen to Shawn, Luke, Tara and also their father at different stages in the book. When Shawn meets with accidents twice, his father asks him to be brought home and not the hospital. This ludicrous demand from her father was based out of nothing but his faith. Same happens in the other instances as well, eventually serving as the greatest advertisment for their fledgling herbal oil business, in the form of her father. It is hard to picture parents, who would keep critically injured children at home, unless they were brainwashed by their faith to do so. So, it would be incorrect for the author to assume that all her ordeals with her father and brother were just sporadic episodes of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and had nothing to do with their normal selves, whom she thought, loved her.

All said, one can only marvel at the way in which the author has navigated through all the odds and achieved self-liberation by discovering who she truly was. She ends the book by saying that what had changed between her and her father was her selfhood, which had now changed from the sixteen year old girl who could be coerced into submission to a new self who took decisions differently. This, she calls, is her Education.

In short, this book is a must read!!

Here is an interview of Tara at PBS: