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EDUCATED: A MEMOIR by Tara Westover New York: Random House, 2018. 352 pp. $28 (cloth).
In Educated, author Tara Westover shares an intimate memoir of her surreal journey from a traumatic upbringing in rural Idaho to the halls of Cambridge University, where she ascended through the ranks of academe to become a rising star in the field of history. Westover pursued a PhD to study the underpinnings of Mormonism as an intellectual movement that has given particular shape to the nation's pious undertones, but Educated makes clear how her scholarly preoccupations are in fact deeply autobiographical. While Westover's intellectual journey is an effort to situate her experience as a woman raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family in a secular society in a longer historical perspective, Educated is best read as a stirring portrait of the personal and the particular.
The text is organized into three parts, each providing short stories that offer rich insight into the psychological costs associated with "moving up" and "making it out"-costs that mainstream narratives about social mobility and higher education tend to obscure. In Part I, readers are drawn into the patter of everyday life in Buck's Peak, Idaho, where the institution of family towers above all else. Spanning nearly half of the text, Part I is devoted to sketching the familial terrain that shapes the author's upbringing: an entrepreneurial mother whose ambitions must be made pliable to her husband's demands and are always carefully couched within the contours of gendered care work; a slew of siblings who illuminate pathways of limited possibility; and, most consequentially, a mentally ill father whose distorted interpretation of religious doctrine directs the family's oppressive ideology.
When Westover was young, her father's mental illness plunged the family into a deep state of isolation and chaos. Readers bear witness as the family's distrust of public institutions...