When I started reading Educated, Tara Westover’s memoir of growing up in rural Idaho as a Mormon survivalist with no foundation of formal education, I was captivated by the chance to glimpse a life and world wholly unlike my own. Reading about Westover’s struggle to pursue a college degree—studying on her own for the ACT, enduring culture shock at Brigham Young University, and confronting just how little she knew of the larger world—was all astounding.
But as the memoir progresses, Westover’s story becomes about more than her journey to transform herself through education. It becomes about estrangement. It becomes, at least in my eyes, the story of my life.
By the time I reached the final pages of Educated, I felt stunned and exposed. Like Westover, I’ve faced—I’ve chosen—estrangement within part of my family. Her story is significantly more dramatic and violent than mine, but even so, the emotional truth of what she lived through felt like home to me.
As a result, Educated threw me off balance. I’d never before read a memoir that mirrors this one aspect of my past that I keep hidden from all but the closest people in my life. I’d never before come across a personal narrative that details the guilt, shame, anger, loneliness, and regret—and also the strength, self-reliance, and resolve—that accompanies this kind of estrangement.
Perhaps there’s a reason I’ve never read anything quite like it before, just like there’s a reason I’ve never written about my own story publicly, and why I’m not about to write it down here. As Westover explains in this interview, she was driven to write Educated precisely because this kind of estrangement is not only messy and complicated, but also taboo. She says:
Having gone through [estrangement], I was aware of why there aren’t that many people openly talking about it. A lot of people do so at the end of their lives, especially when the people they are estranged from have passed away, but I don’t think there’s so many people doing it when they’re younger . . . It’s hard to write about—it’s really hard to publish about—but I think that sense of being the only one who goes through [estrangement] is part of makes it important for people to talk about it.
If you were to compare my biography to Westover’s, you wouldn’t find many similarities. Our childhoods and upbringings, our opportunities, and our family dynamics were all vastly different. Regardless, I came to believe my personal history was reflected in the pages of her memoir. This is what the best writing is capable of accomplishing. It builds connections, it inspires empathy, and it fosters mutual understanding despite our surface-level differences.
All of this makes me appreciate not only Westover’s tenacity and resilience as she pursued an education, but her greater literary achievement. In Educated, she took a story far wilder and more astonishing than anything I had ever personally experienced and convinced me, against the odds, that this story is not merely her own—that it belongs to me, too.