Educated

Got a supply drop in July that had this in it, no note on who sent it, and I burned through it over four evenings faster than most nonfiction manages up here. Westover grows up on a mountain outside a small Idaho town, homeschooled in the loosest possible sense of that word, no birth certificate until she’s nine, working in her father’s scrapyard where she and her brothers get hurt often and badly and nobody goes to a hospital because the family doesn’t believe in modern medicine, or much of anything the government touches. Her father’s convinced the end of the world is coming and stockpiles accordingly. One of her brothers is violent toward her in ways the book doesn’t soften.

I’ve spent enough time on actual mountains for actual reasons to have a low tolerance for books that treat a rural setting as either paradise or backwardness with nothing in between, and Westover mostly avoids both. The scrapyard work is dangerous and she’s specific about it, junked cars and a shear that takes a man’s fingers off, and she’s equally specific about the parts of that life she loved, the physical competence, her father’s genuine tenderness in between the paranoia. She doesn’t flatten her family into villains, which is harder to pull off than it sounds and is most of why the book works.

The education part of the title is literal. She teaches herself enough math and grammar from library books to pass the ACT, gets into Brigham Young having never sat in a classroom, and from there works her way to Cambridge and a PhD in history, and the culture shock chapters, learning what the Holocaust was in a college lecture hall because nobody ever told her, are some of the strongest writing in the book. What kept it from a five for me is the back half, where the family conflict starts repeating in cycles, another visit home, another rupture, another uneasy reconciliation, and the momentum that carried the first half slackens some.

Worth saying the book is honest about how ambiguous the ending is. She doesn’t resolve things with her parents. Doesn’t pretend education fixed everything or that leaving cost nothing. That kind of unresolved honesty is rare in memoirs that could’ve gone for a tidier bow, and I respected it even in the chapters that dragged a little.

Good one to read alone. It’s a book about what a person carries out of an isolated place and what they leave behind, and that’s a subject I’ve got some sympathy for from a different angle entirely.