Educated: A Memoir Major and Minor Quotes

“The only thing worse than being dragged through the house by my hair was Tyler’s having seen it. Given the choice between letting it play out, and having Tyler there to stop it, I’d have chosen to let it play out. Obviously I would have chosen that. I’d been close to passing out anyway, and then I could have forgotten about it. In a day or two it wouldn’t even have been real. It would become a bad dream, and in a month, a mere echo of a bad dream. But Tyler had seen it, had made it real.” (Ch. 13)

– Tara Westover

Analysis: When Tyler comes home and witnesses Shawn attacking Tara, he intervenes and gets Tara to safety. Rather than being relieved that the brother she has always looked up to has protected her, Tara feels an overwhelming sense of shame and wishes that Tyler hadn’t been there. The reason she gives is that, had Tyler not interrupted and stopped Shawn, the attack would not have been “real.”

As we see several times throughout the memoir, Shawn has a standard set of actions he follows after he has been abusive: he apologizes to Tara for hurting her and says he thought they were playing, that he would never have intentionally hurt her. On many occasions, Tara accepts his apology and blames herself for not being clear enough. In other words, both Shawn and Tara are in the habit of rewriting their memories in order to make Shawn appear like a good person. Tyler’s witnessing of Shawn’s abuse makes it impossible for Tara to replace her painful memory of being attacked with a more pleasant one.

“In class I had been taught about neurotransmitters and their effect on brain chemistry; I understood that disease is not a choice. This knowledge might have made me sympathetic to my father, but it didn’t. I felt only anger. We were the ones who’d paid for it, I thought. Mother. Luke. Shawn. We had been bruised and gashed and concussed, had our legs set on fire and our heads cut open. We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at any moment. Because Dad always put faith before safety. Because he believed himself right, and he kept believing himself right—after the first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it was us who paid.” (Ch. 24)

– Tara Westover

Analysis: When a classmate in her psychology class asks whether mental illnesses like bipolar disorder can help to explain political extremism, citing Randy Weaver as an example, Tara realizes that what Gene had told her about Weaver and the Ruby Ridge incident might not reflect what actually happened. As she tries to understand why Gene identified so strongly with Weaver, a committed white supremacist, she begins to suspect that Gene’s paranoia and mood swings might be symptoms of a mental illness.

Although Tara is, by this point, accustomed to learning new information that changes her worldview, her reaction to the possibility that Gene might have a severe mental illness is one of anger. She realizes that the amount of physical injury in her family isn’t normal and also that most of it has been the direct result of Gene being the ultimate authority in the house despite him clearly suffering from a mental illness.

Tara’s inclusion of Shawn in her list of Gene’s victims here is important, especially in light of the kinds of injuries Shawn has suffered—he has multiple head traumas over the course of the book. While Tara doesn’t explicitly speculate about this possibility, repeated head trauma puts people at risk for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which can cause mood swings, personality changes, and violent outbursts.

“As I walked home carrying the heavy manuscript, I remembered attending one of Dr. Kerry’s lectures, which he had begun by writing, ‘Who writes history?’ on the blackboard. I remembered how strange the question had seemed to me then. My idea of a historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of the past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even augmented. Now, as I passed through King’s College, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny. Who writes history? I thought. I do.” (Ch. 38)

– Tara Westover

Analysis: Tara’s completion of her PhD dissertation is a major milestone in her academic journey, but she does not describe the accomplishment as merely a credential that will impress other people. Instead, Tara emphasizes the concrete action of having written an original piece of research.

Recall Tara’s observation in Chapter 23 regarding how her family had always made her feel: “It was not that I had done something wrong so much as that I existed in the wrong way.” Tara uses similar language to describe how uncomfortable she feels around “normal” peers, notably in the context of her first visit to King’s College Chapel, where she feels more like a roofer than a student. This fear of existing in the wrong way prevents Tara from taking action many times throughout the book: recall her fear of asking for help at the beginning of college and her inability to stand up for Emily.

By contrast, “Who writes history? I do” is a statement about action rather than a passive way of existing—Tara doesn’t say “Who is a historian? I am.” Rather, she knows she is a historian because she has done the work of researching and writing history. Academia is a world where actions have come to have a positive meaning for Tara, and she is finally in a place (both physically and emotionally) where she can focus on actions rather than existing in the right way.

“My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened.” (Ch. 1)

– Tara Westover

“There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquility born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence.” (Ch. 3)

– Tara Westover

“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.” (Ch. 4)

– Tara Westover

<h2 id="“In_retrospect,_I_see_that_<em>this“In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.” (Ch. 6)

– Tara Westover

“I’d never seen this side of my father, but I would see it many times after—every time I sang. However long he’d worked in the junkyard, he was never too tired to drive across the valley to hear me. However bitter his feelings toward socialists like Papa Jay, they were never so bitter that, should these people praise my voice, Dad wouldn’t put aside the great battle he was fighting against the Illuminati long enough to say, ‘Yes, God has blessed us, we’re very blessed.’ It was as if, when I sang, Dad forgot for a moment that the world was a frightening place, that it would corrupt me, that I should be kept safe, sheltered, at home. He wanted my voice to be heard.” (Ch. 8)

– Tara Westover

“I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew. The calculation was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts—the fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother’s face.” (Ch. 20)

– Tara Westover

<h2 id="“If_someone_had_asked_me,_I’d_have_said_Charles_was_the_most_important_thing_in_the_world_to_me._But_he_wasn’t._And_I_would_prove_it_to_him._What_<em>was“If someone had asked me, I’d have said Charles was the most important thing in the world to me. But he wasn’t. And I would prove it to him. What was important to me wasn’t love or friendship, but my ability to lie convincingly to myself: to believe I was strong. I could never forgive Charles for knowing I wasn’t.” (Ch. 22)

– Tara Westover

“I had a thousand dollars in my bank account. It felt strange just to think that, let alone say it. A thousand dollars. Extra. That I did not immediately need. It took weeks for me to come to terms with this fact, but as I did, I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money. My professors came into focus, suddenly and sharply; it was as if before the grant I’d been looking at them through a blurred lens.” (Ch. 24)

– Tara Westover

“I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement—since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected—a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality…. In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it.” (Ch. 28)

– Tara Westover

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind.” (Ch. 36)

– Tara Westover