Educated: A Memoir

“All my father’s stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how I’d know when it was time to come home.” 

Westover employs foreshadowing at the beginning of the memoir, indicating to readers that a key part of her memories involves leaving home for extended adventures. This foreshadowing also tells readers something about Westover’s father: His world is small, confined to the boundaries of his home in Idaho. Given his limited experience with the world away from home, it makes sense that he would have no framework for educating his children on how to relate to home in healthy ways when they leave it. This lack of knowledge about how to relate to home when one leaves it becomes a primary source of conflict for Westover, as depicted later in the memoir. 

“Midwifing changed my mother. She was a grown woman with seven children, but this was the first time in her life that she was, without question or caveat, the one in charge.” 

There are several important characters in Westover’s memoir, her mother, Faye, being among them. Westover reveals details of what Faye’s life has been like here. Until she became a midwife, she fulfilled the traditional role of the submissive housewife and mother, obeying everything her husband commanded and ceding control to him in all things. But when she has something that is completely her own—her job midwifing—Westover sees changes in her behavior and personality. She becomes more assertive and confident.

“Until Mother decided to get my birth certificate, not knowing my birthday had never seemed strange. I knew I’d been born near the end of September, and each year I picked a day, one that didn’t fall on a Sunday because it’s no fun spending your birthday in church. Sometimes I just wished Mother would give me the phone so I could explain. ‘I have a birthday, same as you,’ I wanted to tell the voices. ‘It just changes. Don’t you wish you could change your birthday?’”

In addition to not attending public school, the Westover children do not have birth certificates. This is due to Gene’s distrust of the government—he wants nothing to do with the government. Westover likely recognizes that the fact of not having a birth certificate in the United States in the 1990s is shocking to most readers, so she emphasizes here just how normal this felt to her growing up. As a child living life mostly in isolation from other people, Westover had no understanding of just how different her family really was. In fact, she does not understand why outsiders are confused by her not having a birth certificate and not knowing her birthday. 

“As an adult, Dad would develop fierce opinions about women working, radical even for our rural Mormon community. ‘A woman’s place is in the home,’ he would say every time he saw a married woman working in town.” 

This quote reveals more about Gene’s beliefs and, by extension, Faye’s experience as a woman in the Westover home. Gene firmly believes that women should not work, and he actively criticizes women who do work. This belief restricts what Faye can do and experience in her adult life, and it also influences what Gene’s daughters, Tara and Audrey, think and believe about women. More than that, however, this quote reveals just how radical Gene’s beliefs were. Westover implies that the rural Mormon community they lived in was already rather radical, but that Gene’s beliefs were more radical, revealing that, even in their extremely conservative community, the Westovers were still a bit out-of-place. 

“‘What’s college?’ I said. ‘College is extra school for people too dumb to learn the first time around,’ Dad said.” 

This quote reveals more about Gene’s stance on education. He deeply disapproves of college education and sees it as a frivolity. He does not understand the purpose or value of a college education. Moreover, he instills his radical beliefs about college in his children, attempting to influence their perspective on college as well. Gene’s belief that college is useless deeply affects Westover as she decides whether to go to college. 

“Mother had always said we could go to school if we wanted. We just had to ask Dad, she said. Then we could go. But I didn’t ask. There was something in the hard line of my father’s face, in the quiet sigh of supplication he made every morning before he began family prayer, that made me think my curiosity was an obscenity, an affront to all he’d sacrificed to raise me.” 

Gene and Faye give the impression that their children have the freedom to choose to go to school if they want to while they are growing up. But as a child, Westover learns to read between the lines of her father’s beliefs; though she might technically be allowed to attend school if she wants to, she is aware that to make such a choice would come with significant interpersonal and emotional consequences at home. In a way, Gene’s admission that his children can choose to go to school if they want is a test. The right choice would be to stay at home and work for Gene because that choice would affirm his beliefs. The wrong choice would be to go to school because it would prove that the children did not take his beliefs to heart. 

“In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.” 

Defining “education” is a key concern of Westover’s memoir. Growing up, she learns many things and acquires many skills while living on the mountain and working for Gene. When she gets to college, she quickly realizes that most of the things she learned from her father are useless in her new world. The practice of reading things that she could not understand is one of the few skills she learned at home that was useful to her throughout college. 

“I did not need any explanation; I knew what the story meant. It meant that I was not the daughter he had raised, the daughter of faith. I had tried to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.” 

Westover says this right after she tells Gene that she wants to go to college. When she tells him, he asks her if she remembers the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, in which Esau sells his birthright as the oldest child because he is hungry. To Gene, Westover’s desire to go to college is a blatant rejection of her upbringing, of everything Gene taught her. Gene is disappointed, and he wants to make sure Westover knows it. 

“He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark. But God withheld the flood.” 

After Y2K did not occur as Gene preached that it would for months, Westover remembers her view of her father changing slightly. This is the first incident in a series of many that incrementally changes Westover’s perception of her father, and it emphasizes how people’s relationships can dissolve gradually, rather than exploding in a single instance. Whereas before Y2K, Westover saw her father as strong and invincible, she now sees another side to him: vulnerability.

“I don’t know what I saw—what creature I conjured from that violent, compassionate act—but I think it was my father, or perhaps my father as I wished he were, some longed for defender, some fanciful champion, one who wouldn’t fling me into a storm, and who, if I was hurt, would make me whole.” 

This quote introduces an important facet of the relationship between Westover and her abusive older brother, Shawn. When Shawn helps heal an injury that Westover has—an injury that, arguably, Gene’s recklessness caused—she sees him as performing the role that she desperately wishes her father would perform: the defender and protector. The fact that Shawn often stands up for Westover against Gene may also partially explain why she is so willing to make excuses for Shawn’s repeated emotional and physical abusive. In some ways, he is meeting an emotional need that she has—a need that her father cannot meet.

“In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing had affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that it’s not affecting me, that was its effect.” 

Westover is reflecting here on how Shawn’s abusiveness truly affected her. To cope with how much his abusiveness hurt her, Westover pretended to not be hurt by it at all. She built up an image of herself as emotionally unbreakable, convincing herself that nothing—not even Shawn’s abuse—could affect her. Over time, she realizes that by insisting that Shawn’s abusiveness did not affect her, she shut off her ability to be affected by anything. By numbing herself in this way, she delayed having to address the consequences of the abuse she experienced. More than anything, she denied herself the opportunity to deal with what she had experienced and move forward into a healthier place. 

“Mother stopped crying. She was embarrassed. Tyler was an outsider now. He’d been gone for so long, he’d been shifted to that category of people who we kept secrets from. Who we kept this from.” 

One day when Shawn is abusing Westover, Tyler witnesses the abuse in action. He is home from college, and no one knew he was there. Westover, Faye, and Shawn are all caught off guard when Tyler asks what is going on, and all three of them act as if nothing is happening. But Tyler is clearly suspicious, and Westover believes he already knows exactly what is going on. This scenario demonstrates what happens to Westovers who leave home to get an education. The family stops trusting them to stand in solidarity with the family’s beliefs and version of reality, so they treat the person who has left as an outsider. 

“Tyler stood to go. ‘There’s a world out there, Tara,’ he said, ‘And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.’” 

After Tyler witnesses Shawn abusing Westover, he urges her to apply to college and get away from home. Tyler seems to realize even before Westover does that her view of reality is warped, that she is justifying Shawn’s abusive. He knows from experience that Gene’s version of reality is controlling and limiting, and that leaving home is the only way for Westover to step back and see Gene’s beliefs from a new perspective.

“Reflecting on it now, I’m not sure the injury changed him that much, but I convinced myself that it had, and that any cruelty on his part was entirely new. I can read my journals from this period and trace the evolution—of a young girl rewriting her history. In the reality she constructed for herself nothing had been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet. I wish I had my best friend back, she wrote. Before his injury, I never got hurt at all.” 

One of the first times that Westover acknowledges her “rewriting of history” occurs in her memory of Shawn’s accident. In reading her journal entries from that time, she recognizes that she created a reality that would allow her to continue coexisting with her family. This reality was false, but it sheltered her from having to confront Shawn and her father and potentially contending with the fate of being cut off. 

“But my father taught me that there are not two reasonable opinions to be had on any subject: there is Truth and there are Lies. I knelt on the carpet, listening to my father but studying this stranger, and felt suspended between them, drawn to each, repelled by both. I understood that no future could hold them; no destiny could tolerate him and her. I would remain a child, in perpetuity, always, or I would lose him.”

This quote summarizes Gene’s views on truth and reality. He believes—and taught his family—that there cannot be multiple truths. Multiple opinions are not tenable. One opinion is always right, and that opinion is always his opinion. But Gene and Westover have come to a fork in the road: Gene’s opinion is that going to college is a violation of God’s will, and Westover believes that it is not. Westover has to make a choice about college based on one opinion, and she knows that Gene will never waver on his opinion of college. In this quote, she is finally realizing that the only way to make her father happy forever will be to set aside her opinions on everything and remain loyal to his. In other words, if she wants to make her father happy, she cannot grow up. 

“I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side of the other, but there was no foothold in between.”

Westover’s feeling that she must take a side is a byproduct of Gene’s believe in the sovereignty of his opinions. When she gets to BYU, she finds that people—fellow Mormons—violate Gene’s beliefs at every turn. She realizes that to accept or condone those behaviors would be to side with the enemy in Gene’s eyes. In Gene’s world, you are either with him—by practicing his beliefs in every area of your life—or you are against him.

“‘Who is this us?’ Charles said. ‘You’re leaving tomorrow. You’re not one of them anymore.’” 

Westover’s boyfriend back home at Buck’s Peak, Charles, says this to Westover, pointing out that she has left home to pursue an education. Whether she sees it or not, she has separated herself from her family by doing so. And it is clear that Westover does not see it yet. She is still trying to be two people at once: the person she is at home with her family, and the person she is becoming through her education. Charles is one of the first people in Westover’s life to recognize this struggle in Westover; eventually, she cuts him out because she is not ready to face the truth of her separation from her family. 

“To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don’t know. I just don’t know.” 

For the first time in the memoir, Westover acknowledges her experience of doubting her family’s version of reality. For Westover, however, the practice of doubting is strong. In her experience, allowing herself to doubt her family’s staunch certainty was the first step to freeing herself from a life in which other people controlled her. To doubt her father and Shawn’s claims to reality was to open up space for the possibility of a new reality. 

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.” 

This quote reveals the extent to which Westover needed to doubt. Shawn and his abusiveness had not just defined her view of him and his behavior on her behalf—he had also defined her. She realizes that she had allowed herself to be the person that Shawn told her to be for years, and to change who she was and how she saw herself would be extremely difficult as long as she was close to Shawn. 

“I was an incurious student that semester. Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars.” 

In the midst of suffering from abuse at the hands of her family, Westover had other issues during her time at BYU. Like many students who grow up in families who do not value or have access to education, Westover had recurring financial problems. This quote highlights the intense emotional stress that socioeconomically disadvantaged students often experience and emphasizes the fact that this stress can often inhibit those students from succeeding in college. 

“Whatever the reason, he wasn’t satisfied until I had admitted that I’d never been to school. ‘How marvelous,’ he said, smiling. ‘It’s as if I’ve stepped into Shaw’s Pygmalion.’” 

Westover employs a literary reference in this quote. Her faculty advisor at Cambridge, Dr. Steinberg, learns that she never attended school growing up, and compares her to a character in George Bernard Shaw’s twentieth century play, Pygmalion. In the play, a renowned linguist finds a poor, uneducated girl in the streets of London and decides he will teach her how to blend in with the London upper class. In the case of Dr. Steinberg and Westover, he views her as a piece of clay that could be shaped into anything through education. Like the linguist with the poor girl in Pygmalion, Dr. Steinberg sees Westover as both fascinating and promising.

“I didn’t want to be Horatio Alger in someone’s tear-filled homage to the American dream. I wanted my life to make sense, and nothing in that narrative made sense to me.” 

Westover uses another literary reference here. Horatio Alger wrote young adult novels about impoverished boys who rose from impoverished backgrounds to live comfortable, middle-class lives through sheer determination and hard work. Westover feels that if she revealed her background to the reports who want to interview her when she gets a scholarship to Cambridge for graduate school, they will put her on a pedestal, just like the boys in the Horatio Alger novels. She knows that she would be seen as the poster child for the American Dream, coming from a home in which she received no education and getting a scholarship to one of the most prestigious universities in the world. But Westover does not want to be a stereotype; she just wants to understand why her parent would willingly choose to give her a life that would position her to become a stereotype. 

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.” 

Westover finally finds herself and what she believes, and these beliefs are derived from her own hard work, her own studies and adventures and experiences out in the world. For the first time, she has a mind that is her own—not her father’s. When her father begs her to recommit to her faith, she recognizes that doing so would be to give her mind back over to his way of thinking, his beliefs, and his control. Westover cannot give herself up, though, and ultimately refuses to do what Gene asks. She chooses to be true to herself over living a lie.