Educated: A Memoir Discussion Questions

Throughout the memoir, Tara frequently calls attention to the imperfection of her own memory, often contrasting the way she remembers events with the recollections of other people. She even includes a postscript to the book (“A Note on the Text”) in which she further grapples with how to reconcile conflicting accounts of events. Why do you think she does this? Does it make you trust her more or less as a narrator?

Overwhelmingly, Tara mentions memory lapses or conflicting accounts in the context of herself or a family member getting injured. In the postscript, the two examples she calls out are Luke’s burn injury in Chapter 7 and Shawn’s fall in Chapter 14. On multiple occasions she also describes her mind going blank while she is being beaten by Shawn. In addition, Tara opens Chapter 25 with a long reflection on the various conflicting family narratives about her paternal grandfather being injured decades before, showing that her family has a long tradition of being unable to settle on a “true” version of events.

It is possible to read multiple meanings in Tara’s use of ambiguity. On the one hand, despite all the progress she has made since the events of the memoir, Tara still seems somewhat uncomfortable citing her own memory as an authoritative reference, especially when it contradicts her father’s. On the other hand, Tara approaches the task of reconstructing ambiguous events like a historian would, collecting different primary sources in an attempt to get the full picture as objectively as possible. She presents all the evidence she’s been able to collect, and then lets us as readers make up our minds about what to believe.

Although Educated is a work of nonfiction, it shares some similarities with the genre of the coming-of-age novel, also commonly referred to as the Bildungsroman (German for “education novel”). Some famous novels that fall into this genre are Charlotte BrontĂ«’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Can you think of any other novels that could be compared to Educated? How are they similar and how are they different?

One of the most famous fictional stories about life-changing education is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Both Tara and Harry begin their stories as bright children living in unhappy, stifling households, which they escape by being accepted to schools that serve as safe havens while nurturing their talents. Both also have their sense of reality altered when they begin school: Harry because he learns magic is real, and Tara because she learns how much what her parents taught her is based on lies and delusions.

One major difference is that Harry’s education makes him feel closer to his deceased parents, while Tara’s brings her freedom from hers. Another is Tara’s persistent loneliness; whereas Harry can count on help from his friends and his teachers, Tara navigates most of her struggles completely on her own. Even when she begins to let people in, she rarely lets herself depend on them. Finally, whereas Harry and his friends have a concrete enemy to fight in the person of Voldemort, Tara’s biggest challenge is overcoming her own fears and insecurities in order to remove herself from a physically and mentally dangerous situation. Her “happy ending” is not the defeat of her enemies, but rather the hard-won freedom to live her own life without shame or fear.

Tara’s brothers Tyler and Richard also leave the Westover home to pursue higher education and both ultimately earn PhDs, but they are never fully rejected by the Westover family, even after they decide to side with Tara. Why do you think it is easier for Gene and Faye to accept their sons’ life choices than Tara’s?

The most obvious difference between Tara and her two college-educated brothers is that Tyler and Richard are both men, which, according to her parents’ worldview, allows them a greater range of acceptable behavior, including the right to choose their own careers. In addition, because Shawn’s violence is mostly targeted at women, Tyler and Richard were never victimized to the degree that Tara and Audrey were, which never put them in the position of asking their parents to confront Shawn. Their ultimate semi-estrangement is the result of them refusing to cut off contact with Tara; they are never asked to recant their own memories. Finally, both Tyler and Richard married young and had large families before the family schism started. By establishing their own households, they have become somewhat independent from Gene’s authority (more so than Shawn, who is still financially dependent on his parents despite having a wife and children).

Throughout the memoir, Tara sometimes interrupts the narrative with anecdotes about the natural world. Referring to a specific example, why do you think she chose to include it?

One example can be found in Chapter 4, where Grandma-down-the-hill takes Tara and Richard into the Arizona desert to hunt for pieces of black obsidian. Grandma-down-the-hill explains that these pebbles are called “Apache tears” because of a legend in which Apache women, hearing that their husbands and sons had jumped off a cliff to their deaths rather than surrender to US soldiers, shed tears that turned into stone. Tara concludes the anecdote by musing about how, for these women, “Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.” This sentiment is especially apt in this chapter, which begins and ends with descriptions of the car accident that leaves Tara’s mother with a brain injury and the teenaged Tyler, who had been behind the wheel, feeling immense guilt. While Faye and Tyler are the ones who suffer the consequences, it is Gene who has actually made all of the decisions that have led to this point. As a young member of the Westover family, Tara feels that her present and future are as rigid and unchangeable as the obsidian stones. Just as it would be impossible to turn the Apache tears back into individual grains of sand, the young Tara thinks that it is impossible to escape the reality created by her father’s past choices.

Another example is the anecdote about the injured owl found by the Westover children in Chapter 18. When the Westovers try to nurse it back to health, the owl fights back, refuses to eat, and ultimately escapes back into the wild despite its life-threatening injuries. This story sticks out because it is chronologically out of place: While the rest of the chapter is set during Tara’s first semester of college, she describes herself as “very young” when she found the owl. It makes sense that she includes it here, however, because the owl works as a metaphor for her state of mind as she finds herself in a classroom for the first time. Just like the owl “didn’t belong” inside even though it was unable to survive on its own in the wild, Tara at this point feels unable to fit into the mainstream world, even though she knows she has no future at home.

How does Tara’s understanding of education change over time?

Tara’s parents refuse to allow her to attend school as a child and fail to provide any homeschooling beyond teaching her how to read and write. Instead, they attempt to train her in what they believe to be proper womanhood. This “education” is actually very successful, in the sense that it shapes how Tara sees and understands the world even into her young adulthood. As a young girl she decides her peers in dance class are “little harlots” for wearing leotards, and when she arrives at college she is horrified at seeing her roommates wear tank tops inside their own homes. While Tara’s parents were able to shape Tara’s mind through speech, when she is a teenager, her brother Shawn justifies his abusive behavior as attempts to “teach” Tara the same lessons. At one point, when she is around 15, Tara even asks Shawn to train her how to be a proper woman, feeling that “[w]hat was of worth was not me, but the veneer of constraints and observances that obscured me.” These “constraints,” or proper behaviors, are things that Tara feels unable to teach herself; instead, as she has been trained to do her entire life, she believes that her male relatives possess the authority to teach her how to be good.

Years before she first sets foot in a classroom, Tara begins another sort of education, which in retrospect she considers “the one that would matter,” when she begins to independently read and write essays about Mormon history. While the subject matter was very much in line with what her parents and brother tried to teach her, “The skill I was learning,” she later reflects, “was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.” This skill ends up empowering Tara to change her life. It allows her to successfully tutor herself in math to improve her ACT score, and later, when she gets to college and finds herself unprepared for her classes, it allows her to transform her failing grades into nearly all As over the course of a single semester.

By the end of the memoir, Tara is outwardly a very educated person according to most definitions. In the last chapter, however, she explains that her degrees aren’t what made the difference in her self-perception. Instead, she points to her discovery of an independent selfhood, the ability to make her own decisions, as what she considers “an education.”