Len’s Letter #11
Tara’s Terror. Tara Westover’s “Educated”
Depressed, Tara Westover, an escapee from her survivalist, evangelical parents, was reading John Stuart Mill. At Trinity College, Cambridge on a fellowship. Before she began work on her doctorate. She had a pile of books by feminists. Mill was a nineteenth century liberal and a feminist. She said he described women as having “been coaxed, cajoled, shoved, and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”
Westover calls her story “Educated.” I Hers was quite an education. In her survivalist family, Westover was supposed to have been in the kitchen. She was coaxed cajoled, shoved, and squashed into contortions regarding her abilities and her aspirations. The oppression was true despite her mother’s nascent and then burgeoning medicinal oils business empire.
The modern world barely peeks into Tara’s world. Politics rarely surfaces. In their county, Hillary Clinton got 7% of the vote in 2016. Westover’s Idaho is that far from the rest of the country’s world view.
Many memoirs and novels are about a young girl whose love of reading helped her escape poverty or her family’s lack of education. Few protagonists had so limited a reading list (Mormon literature and the New Testament) as Tara Westover. Few protagonists experienced the danger Tara Westover risked. Few experience as much humiliation or the consequences of that humiliation so clearly.
Her brother tortured her. He broke her toe and broke it again. The tortured toe caused extreme pain. Pain that was only different from the pain caused by his psychological torture of his sister, his girlfriend, and, ultimately, his wife.
Fetch. You brought the wrong thing. Fetch the right thing. Not something similar to the right thing. The exact thing. And so on.
The judge and jury. Was this torture? Mostly dad. Sometimes mom who demonstrated occasional sympathy. Dad’s standard of evidence seemed like more torture. Your brother may have been just playing. You may have misunderstood. How do I know that there is a basis for your complaint? She could never have persuaded Dad there was anything wrong.
Until mom’s business became large enough for Dad to declare himself a partner and to act the terrifying human resources director, he was a sometimes contractor and sometimes caretaker of his scrap yard. He put everyone to work —Tara Westover included. Did he threaten her with iron breaking equipment to actually do her harm or to make the work so dangerous that it was terrifying?
Mistrust is an insufficient word. Hatred of the government, hatred of modern medicine, hatred of the modern world predominates. We read about Dad’s construction business. Accident after accident, culminating in Dad’s godawful accident that burns his face, his mouth and throat.
Here we are, comfortable in the modern world. We might wish for OSHA. OSHA oversight in Tara Westover’s county is less probable than Pakistan’s military gaining control of Baluchistan. The federal government could not enforce safety rules on Dad’s construction business or his scrap yard because the federal government rarely governs there. Dad’s great and frightening myth, absorbed by Tara, is one rare instance of the federal government attempting to enforce the law in rural Idaho. That is the Randy Weaver siege, an FBI army needed to impose federal law.
Cheers for Brigham Young University. Are there alternative universities more welcoming to kids escaping parental ignorance? Do well on your ACT and BYU will admit you. No questions asked. Not even how old are you? Tara’s bookish brother (not the torturer) took the test and went to BYU. Tara did, too. Though she had to take the test twice to understand what she didn’t know.
Tara Westover’s memoir is a story of a partial escape. Her story is a story of breaking and entering into the modern world, the world of learning. Her sequence: BYU, Cambridge, BYU, Cambridge, Harvard. Made possible by a BYU needs-based scholarship and a Cambridge fellowship. Made possible by a bishop (local Mormon minister) who supported her in her earliest years at BYU. Mentors who appreciated Westover’s combination of dogged learning and insightful analysis. Friends who sometimes helped, sometimes stood back in amazement. Boyfriends who were supporters (nothing here about sex – unless you count her torturing brother calling her a whore when her clothing did not meet his standards of modesty).
Tara Westover never completely escapes. Her felt obligation to love her Mom and Dad – no matter how cruel, no matter how insistent they are in cutting her off – is inescapable. She studied psychology for a while. Her father, she thought, was bi-polar. Maybe schizophrenic. Did she look for mental illnesses that excused him for recklessness and cruelty?
Westover does enter the modern world. She lives and works in universities. She earns credentials and respect. Her first book is not a product of her dissertation. It is this memoir.
Education. Tara Westover, in her book about education, wants you understand her experience as a process of education.
Escape. Westover escaped from survivalists who struck it rich, who terrified their children, whose physical and psychological cruelty was world class.
Breaking and entering. Westover broke into the modern world. There was nothing impersonal about her studying psychology or the expectations of religion. ]Brigham Young University was crucial. From there she found her way to the most internationally renowned universities after BYU.
These Notes and Letters are supposed to be about politics. What does this Letter have to do with politics?
The tension between what we know as civil culture and the brutishness with which Donald Trump courts those who don’t participate in that civil culture dominates our politics. Donald Trump is not alone. Sadly, most Republicans have joined him. Educated is about the extreme end of American culture that Donald Trump has been cultivating.
Read the book. Educated by Tara Westover. Skim the scariest parts if you must. Skip the scariest parts if you must. There is a lot that is scary.