[W]hispering, wondering, worrying. That I was not right.

Educated, by Tara Westover, 2018 (memoir)

It’s summer 1996. Tara Westover is 10 years old and living with her parents, her sister, and two of her five brothers in the home that her father built on the side of a mountain in rural southern Idaho.

At least, her family guesses she’s 10. Like most of her siblings, Tara was born at home and doesn’t have an official birth certificate, or any record of her birth.

On this particular day, her older brother Luke is helping their father up the mountain with his latest odd job: preparing junked cars for the crusher.

Tara is home alone washing dishes when she hears horrendous bellowing outside.

She rushes into the yard and finds Luke crying for their mother before collapsing to the ground. His leg is very badly burned, jeans melted to flesh. Tara can see red and bloody skin as well as dead skin, with “ropes of papery skin” wrapping his thigh and calf.

But Luke isn’t taken to the hospital – not then and not that night, when pain robs him of sleep and even of his breath at times, nor any of the excruciatingly painful days that follow.

Their father believes that the medical establishment in America cannot be trusted.

A man who is – if anything – true to his word, he won’t permit Tara’s mother to be taken to the hospital when she suffers a serious head injury in a car accident, both eyes black-and-blue and nearly swollen shut; or Tara’s brother Shawn when his motorcycle accident leaves him with his brain peeking through a hole in his skull; or himself when he suffers third-degree burns to his face, arms, and hands in a work accident.

“I don’t even know you, but I’m so proud of you, and so happy for you, for what you did.” – Ellen DeGeneres to Tara Westover when she appeared as a guest on "The Ellen Show"

Tara's father also believes that any kind of formal education is tantamount to

brainwashing by the government, and even forbids homeschooling due to its proliferation of the same ideas taught in schools.

Instead, the Westover children are educated through their chores and injurious physical labor, which for Tara includes everything from helping her herbalist-turned-midwife mother make health tinctures to helping her dad break down scrap metal for cash.

They are a Mormon family, and Tara's father is as staunch in believing that women are made to serve their husband as he is in believing that formal education is dangerous.

"From the moment I had first understood that my brother Richard was a boy and I was a girl, I had wanted to exchange his future for mine. My future was motherhood; his, fatherhood. They sounded similar but they were not. To be one was to be a decider. To preside. To call the family to order. To be the other was to be among those called.

I knew my yearning was unnatural. This knowledge, like so much of my self-knowledge, had come to me in the voice of people I knew, people I loved. All through the years that voice had been with me, whispering, wondering, worrying. That I was not right."

Fast forward a few years (during which the author displays some incredible feats of self-determination) and Tara is a full-time student at Bringham Young University, studying history. She’s speaking with Tyler, a male Mormon friend.

He asks her if she thinks people should study church history, even if it makes them unhappy. His mom had questioned her faith after she learned about polygamy.

Tara admits she has never understood polygamy either. A silence follows.

"Perhaps both of us were thinking of our history, or perhaps only I was. I thought of Joseph Smith, who’d had as many as forty wives. Bringham Young had had fifty-five wives and fifty-six children. The church had ended the temporal practice of polygamy in 1890, but it had never recanted the doctrine. As a child I’d been taught – by my father but also in Sunday school – that in the fullness of time God would restore polygamy, and in the afterlife, I would be a plural wife. The number of my sister wives would depend on my husband’s righteousness: the more nobly he lived, the more wives he would be given."

Far from being raised Mormon, I myself sometimes see marriage as a sort of legalized, normalized captivity.

It makes me nervous just to ponder being raised in a household where I was not only expected to become a wife and good servant of my husband but also just one of his many wives.

Regarding that last part – about the more righteous the man, the more wives yada yada – imagine it reversed. What if the vast majority of the world’s cultures worshipped mainly a female god (or many female gods), and women had been our apostles, priests, and spiritual leaders (as well as our politicians and overall decision-makers) throughout time. The nobler the woman, the more husbands she gets.

You start to get a feel for the vast imbalance of power between men and women in a range of belief systems spanning human history.

Tara Westover‘s memoir is a true page-turner that has you cheering for her right up through the “not an end” ending. Her decision to take ownership of her own mind (i.e., reject her father’s dogmas and pursue her education) comes at a huge cost.

Westover’s insights throughout "Educated" show wisdom beyond her years, and have inspired me to further the education of my own mind.