Summary: A young woman recalls the time she spent with her extreme survivalist family and how she escaped into the world of higher education.
Rating & Recommendation: 5/5, a must read for those with a strong constitution.
Review: Parts of this book are really difficult to read. She spends almost too much time talking in excruciating detail about the injuries her family sustains as a result of their lifestyle. It's painful and gory, and there were quite a few times I thought I would put the book down and call it quits. But I found myself thinking that if Tara Westover could make it through that life, then I could at least make it through reading about it. Perseverance is a strange thing. It's almost like the reader can't turn away from her life because she couldn't turn away from it either. This book has a lot to say about the conventionally (and unconventionally) religious, the absolute necessity of an education, familial loyalty, and the responsibilities of mothers to their daughters. It will definitely make you uncomfortable, and if you have any triggers or traumas related to domestic violence, I would skip this one.
The two major takeaways here are really about education and mental health.
Tara Westover is living proof of the power of an education. I’m not talking about expensive degrees and long text books and cold classrooms. I’m talking about the freedom to learn, the thrill of curiosity, and the value of knowing. To stifle a mind is a terrible thing. When you rob someone of knowledge, you rob them of liberation and imagination and autonomy. You rob them of their confidence and independence and identity. One should never stop learning. To me that’s akin to smacking a gift in the face.
She's also living proof of what happens when mental health goes unchecked. There's really explicit references to her family's bipolar disorder, their paranoia and their rage. But there is also the overarching theme that she can't trust her own memories, that she's an unreliable narrator. You find it in the footnotes and in her confessions that time and trauma have eroded her judgment. To mistrust your mind is a cruel sensation. And the only thing worse is being ignored and abandoned when what you need the most is help.
I truly believe that minds are meant to be open and free, and that some minds come with barriers or fissures or floods that make them vulnerable. The problem is that we (the greater, societal we) want to blame minds for being vulnerable instead of building them to be stronger. Would you blame copper for being weaker than iron? Instead, you’d meld and morph until you have something as strong as steel. That’s what treating mental health is - it’s buttressing the fault lines of your mind until it can withstand the weight of everything you have to hold.
I spent most of this book thinking to myself this child needs help, and then being frustrated that there didn't seem to be many avenues by which she could receive it. It was really satisfying every time someone extended an offer to help her, and then so sad to see her reject it because she didn't feel worthy.
Still, if you have the stomach to wade through the storm of the abuse and the oppression and the sheer ignorance, if you can get over your own judgement and shock and disgust, I think you’ll feel rewarded at the end. It feels like a natural disaster leveled you, stripping away everything you thought you knew and the shapes and sizes and scope of your world, and the only thing to do now is rebuild. I guess it’s perspective. This was an education for me - about taking my knowledge for granted, about saying thank you to my support system. It’s a rough read, and I spent a lot of this book being angry, but I think it pays off in the end.
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