Educated _ A memoir ( PDFDrive )

said Grandpa had canceled his plans for the next day, and was
refusing even to go to the temple, as he usually did on
Wednesdays, because he wanted to be at home in case I came by.
To this Angie added: I get to see you in about twelve hours! But
who’s counting?

* The italicized language in the description of the referenced exchange is paraphrased,
not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved.

When I was a child, I waited for my mind to grow, for my
experiences to accumulate and my choices to solidify, taking shape
into the likeness of a person. That person, or that likeness of one,
had belonged. I was of that mountain, the mountain that had
made me. It was only as I grew older that I wondered if how I had
started is how I would end—if the first shape a person takes is
their only true shape.

As I write the final words of this story, I’ve not seen my parents
in years, since my grandmother’s funeral. I’m close to Tyler,
Richard and Tony, and from them, as well as from other family, I
hear of the ongoing drama on the mountain—the injuries, violence
and shifting loyalties. But it comes to me now as distant hearsay,
which is a gift. I don’t know if the separation is permanent, if one
day I will find a way back, but it has brought me peace.

That peace did not come easily. I spent two years enumerating
my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every
resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect,
would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I

thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch
my breath.

But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or
rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about
them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing
to do with other people.

I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms,
without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing
his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I
learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not
because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.

It was the only way I could love him.

When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that
life, I perceived him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of
conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. When he was
before me, towering, indignant, I could not remember how, when I
was young, his laugh used to shake his gut and make his glasses
shine. In his stern presence, I could never recall the pleasant way
his lips used to twitch, before they were burned away, when a
memory tugged tears from his eyes. I can only remember those
things now, with a span of miles and years between us.

But what has come between me and my father is more than
time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my
father raised, but he is the father who raised her.

If there was a single moment when the breach between us,
which had been cracking and splintering for two decades, was at
last too vast to be bridged, I believe it was that winter night, when
I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, while, without
my knowing it, my father grasped the phone in his knotted hands
and dialed my brother. Diego, the knife. What followed was very
dramatic. But the real drama had already played out in the

bathroom.

It had played out when, for reasons I don’t understand, I was
unable to climb through the mirror and send out my sixteen-year-
old self in my place.

Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how
much I appeared to have changed—how illustrious my education,
how altered my appearance—I was still her. At best I was two
people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I
crossed the threshold of my father’s house.

That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me.
She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment
were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of
a changed person, a new self.

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation.
Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.

I call it an education.

For Tyler

To my brothers Tyler, Richard and Tony I owe the greatest debt for
making this book possible, first in the living of it, then in the
writing of it. From them and their wives, Stefanie, Kami and
Michele, I learned much of what I know about family.

Tyler and Richard in particular were generous with their time
and their memories, reading multiple drafts, adding their own
details, and in general helping me make the book as accurate as
possible. Though our perspectives may have differed in some
particulars, their willingness to verify the facts of this story
enabled me to write it.

Professor David Runciman encouraged me to write this memoir
and was among the first to read the manuscript. Without his
confidence in it, I might never have had confidence in it myself.

I am grateful to those who make books their life’s work and who
gave a portion of that life to this book: my agents, Anna Stein and
Karolina Sutton; and my wonderful editors, Hilary Redmon and
Andy Ward at Random House, and Jocasta Hamilton at
Hutchinson; as well as the many other people who worked to edit,
typeset and launch this story. Most notably, Boaty Boatwright at
ICM was a tireless champion. Special thanks are owed to Ben
Phelan, who was given the difficult task of fact-checking this book,

and who did so rigorously but with great sensitivity and
professionalism.

I am especially grateful to those who believed in this book
before it was a book, when it was just a jumble of home-printed
papers. Among those early readers are Dr. Marion Kant, Dr. Paul
Kerry, Annie Wilding, Livia Gainham, Sonya Teich, Dunni Alao
and Suraya Sidhi Singh.

My aunts Debbie and Angie came back into my life at a crucial
moment, and their support means everything. For believing in me,
always, thanks to Professor Jonathan Steinberg. For granting me
haven, emotional as well as practical, in which to write this book, I
am indebted to my dear friend, Drew Mecham.

Certain footnotes have been included to give a voice to memories
that differ from mine. The notes concerning two stories—Luke’s
burn and Shawn’s fall from the pallet—are significant and require
additional commentary.

In both events, the discrepancies between accounts are many
and varied. Take Luke’s burn. Everyone who was there that day
either saw someone who wasn’t there, or failed to see someone
who was. Dad saw Luke, and Luke saw Dad. Luke saw me, but I
did not see Dad and Dad did not see me. I saw Richard and
Richard saw me, but Richard did not see Dad, and neither Dad nor
Luke saw Richard. What is one to make of such a carousel of
contradiction? After all the turning around and round, when the
music finally stops, the only person everyone can agree was
actually present that day is Luke.

Shawn’s fall from the pallet is even more bewildering. I was not
there. I heard my account from others, but was confident it was
true because I’d heard it told that way for years, by many people,
and because Tyler had heard the same story. He remembered it
the way I did, fifteen years later. So I put it in writing. Then this
other story appeared. There was no waiting, it insists. The chopper
was called right away.

I’d be lying if I said these details are unimportant, that the “big
picture” is the same no matter which version you believe. These
details matter. Either my father sent Luke down the mountain
alone, or he did not; either he left Shawn in the sun with a serious
head injury, or he did not. A different father, a different man, is
born from those details.

I don’t know which account of Shawn’s fall to believe. More
remarkably, I don’t know which account of Luke’s burn to believe,
and I was there. I can return to that moment. Luke is on the grass.
I look around me. There is no one else, no shadow of my father,
not even the idea of him pushing in on the periphery of my
memory. He is not there. But in Luke’s memory he is there, laying
him gently in the bathtub, administering a homeopathic for shock.

What I take from this is a correction, not to my memory but to
my understanding. We are all of us more complicated than the
roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell. This is
especially true in families. When one of my brothers first read my
account of Shawn’s fall, he wrote to me: “I can’t imagine Dad
calling 911. Shawn would have died first.” But maybe not. Maybe,
after hearing his son’s skull crack, the desolate thud of bone and
brain on concrete, our father was not the man we thought he
would be, and assumed he had been for years after. I have always
known that my father loves his children and powerfully; I have
always believed that his hatred of doctors was more powerful. But
maybe not. Maybe, in that moment, a moment of real crisis, his
love subdued his fear and hatred both.

Maybe the real tragedy is that he could live in our minds this
way, in my brother’s and mine, because his response in other
moments—thousands of smaller dramas and lesser crises—had led
us to see him in that role. To believe that should we fall, he would
not intervene. We would die first.

We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in
stories. Nothing has revealed that truth to me more than writing
this memoir—trying to pin down the people I love on paper, to
capture the whole meaning of them in a few words, which is of
course impossible. This is the best I can do: to tell that other story
next to the one I remember. Of a summer day, a fire, the smell of
charred flesh, and a father helping his son down the mountain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TARA WESTOVER was born in Idaho in 1986. She received her BA from Brigham Young
University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She
earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting
fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD
in history in 2014. Educated is her first book.

tarawestover.com
Facebook.com/TaraWestoverLit

Twitter: @tarawestover

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