Read Educated and Get Educated

While it's hard to think much more than "The horror! The horror!" while you're reading Tara Westbrook's memoir Educated-- the tale of a girl (barely) raised and (barely) homeschooled by a fanatically religious, preparing-for-the-apocalypse, fighting Big Medicine, scrapmetal-baron nutjob of a dad; while she is mercilessly manipulated and bullied by her older brother, and mainly left to fend for herself by a brainwashed, homeopathic midwife mom . . . the twists and turns of Westover's life and-- more importantly-- her mind, as she confronts the reality beyond the mountains of Idaho are wild, awkward, painful, and nearly beyond belief, but despite her lack of formal education, she makes her way to BYU, then on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where-- after a pit stop at Harvard-- she finally earns her doctorate in historiography; I'm not sure which tales of violence, fanaticism, and familial neglect to take with a grain of salt, and in the end, neither does Westover-- and that is the real theme of the book: Westover gets her degree is historiography, as she is interested in who gets to tell the story-- history is written by the winners, the losers, the monks, the fanatics, the believers, the scientists, the laity, and the skeptics . . . and this is what the book is, an investigation into the murky recesses of memory, whether it be the mundane details of a dysfunctional family, a family where memory is controlled by one ranting biased zealot . . . or whether it is the influence of various cultures and religions on the evolution of the family unit in America, the subject of Westover's doctoral thesis: “The Family, Morality, and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813-1890,” in which she synthesizes Mormonism-- which is often ignored-- into the bigger narrative; in the end, while this book is a scandalous, tell-all page-turner, it becomes more than that because Westover is so smart, and so weird, and so obsessive, and so candid and sincere . . . a must read for all of us East Coast agnostics.