Book Review: Educated - T. Westover

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.” 

If this was fiction, I would have said a very interesting and compelling novel. But this is real life, this is an autobiography and consequently for me it is quite shocking and very dramatic.
Religion doesn't really matter in the book, what matters is a bipolar father that has never seen a doctor and his personality is so strong and his wife so subdued to him that he ruins his life and the ones of his entire family. No doctors, no school, everything needs to remain in the family.
A serie of psychological abuses from a father to his family and afterwards from a brother to his siblings. People too scared of being banned from the family to face them and confront them.
And of the three of them that find the courage to fly the nest and go and study, in reality it is just Tara who breaks her mind from the poisoned relationship.
Brave, brave, brave. A survivor, but a strong one, who went on to build a great life for herself after years of abuse.
Unbelievable that in this modern age this is still the reality in some places. I really wonder how many Taras there are out there. It is sad.
A must read, and a loud well done to Tara for reinventing herself.

“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” 

Overall rating:  8,5    Plot: 8,5   Writing style: 8   Cover:  6

Title: Educated

Author: Tara Westover
Publisher: Windmill Books 
Pages: 400
Publication year: 2018

The Plot:

Tara Westover and her family grew up preparing for the End of Days but, according to the government, she didn’t exist. She hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she’d never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn’t believe in hospitals. 
As she grew older, her father became more radical and her brother more violent. At sixteen, Tara knew she had to leave home. In doing so she discovered both the transformative power of education, and the price she had to pay for it.

The Author:
Tara Westover was born in rural Idaho. She studied history at Brigham Young University and upon graduation was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She received an MPhil in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and a PhD in the same subject in 2014.