Educated: A Memoir
By: Tara Westover / Narrated By: Julia Whelan
Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
Big Sis and I differed on this, but hey! listen to meeeeee: Devastatingly fanTAStic!!!
Here’s how an evening goes for the Audiobook Accomplice Reviewer’s evenings: The husband and I take an hourlong walk and then?
Yesssss! The husband reads aloud and I kick back onto the loveseat and scarf TexMex TrailMix and listen to m’ heart’s content. I am, after all, a Listener first and foremost, printed books being a thing of the past and all that.
And so we got to Educated by Tara Westover, and I was so goshdanged floored by it, was left reeling and breathless, that I cajoled Big Sis into listening to it with me in audiobook form for the final week of Women’s History Month. The writing was so incredibly smooth, the content so brutal and graphically depicted, the ending so… so… so… well, I’ll leave it to you to decide when you listen to it.
Cuz I HIGHLY recommend it.
But here’s the thing. Big Sis?
Not too impressed. And she felt rather bludgeoned over the head with the repeated and near-constant abuse Westover suffers at the hands of one of her brothers. Not to mention? Westover’s father is just Way TOO MUCH! The man is mentally unstable, feels perpetually persecuted by all and sundry (The Government and the Illuminati), and it’s just a matter of time before The End Of Days will strike. He believes in Prepping, the Apocalypse can’t come fast enough, a massive drum of gasoline, some way to get water, and Military-Grade weaponry? He’s set.
He really, really, reeeeeeally believes it.
So anyhoo.
Young Tara opens this book, out of school, no birth certificate, and the Weaver’s of Ruby Ridge have had their run-in with the Government, adding fuel to her father’s long-smoldering fire. Mom is an herbalist, then has to become a midwife cuz it’ll be a necessary skill when the End has come and she’ll be needing to bring her children’s children into the world. Tho’ Mom does NOT want to do this, it’s one of a MULtitude of things that Dad makes her do throughout the entirety of this Pull No Punches memoir.
A passive mother, abuse, abuse, abuse.
And the slowly dawning awareness that pretty much all she’s learned, all she’s believed, is not how the world really works.
A true Pygmalion story.
I found it breathtaking. Galling. Disturbing.
Fascinating to see how much insight Tara had into her exceedingly flawed foundation after, really, so little time. I, after all, am still seeing a therapist to fix m’ own flawed foundation, so I was mesmerized by her hard-won wisdom, at such a relatively young age. Her courage to cut off contact with a man who has the ability to suck her down to the depths of insanity. Her steadfast determination to even forego seeing a mother whose passivity has the ability to draw her into a family structure that is most certainly unsound.
And I was further mesmerized by her finding a place for herself in a world that was foreign to her, that she, really, had not much of a chance of fitting into. A fish outta water? A fish in a frying pan more likely. She could’ve combusted. She could’ve forever lost her way after most DEFinitely combusting.
Julia Whelan is just spectacular here. She captures a weary and misguided, and wholly ignorant, little girl. Takes us through to her dawning awareness of the world, of her dawning awareness of being female and thinking, “Whore,” when touched by a boy she likes. That Whelan can make the unspeakable normal, can make the chaos normal, can make the unfathomable just par for the course? MagNIFicent!
And then she finally takes us to a Tara who knows her place in this world she never expected, is sure-footed and still capable of love and curiosity. Outstanding.
Nope, Big Sis really found this to be too much of man’s inhumanity to women, of the normalization of it on, not a daily basis but an hourly one, and depicted so very brutally.
I think it exhausted her.
Me? I cried. I grieved my own lost little girl.
And boy! did I cheer m’self hoarse, or what?!?
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