In the middle of rural Idaho, born and raised
At the junkyard is where she spends all of her days
Sorting out scrap and following Mormon rules
And avoiding government institutions like hospitals and schools
It looks like she’s in for a life of abuse
Then her world gets flip-flopped upside down
When she gets into college out of town
Although a Fresh Prince riff feels a little glib for the often dark parts of Tara Westover’s memoir, at base her story shares some similarities- this is a growing up story that involves fleeing violence, hopefully for a better life. The initial sections of Westover’s memoir detail her childhood in the mountains of southeast Idaho with survivalist parents who believe that the government is out to get them. Less explicitly discussed, but also informing these events is the family’s faith- as fundamentalist Mormons, traditional gender norms are the expectation and this leads to a culture where domestic abuse is accepted or ignored. Eventually Tara leaves her hometown to attend college in Utah and from there springboards to a PhD program at Cambridge, all of which causes her to question the choices her parents made in her upbringing.
I grew up in a not dissimilar geographic setting to Tara (a farm in rural Alberta), so I read this novel with some undetached interest. Certain parts of what she describes felt similar- the general lack of safety precautions in family farming in particular- but other parts were far from my own experience and are examples of not just bad but dangerous parenting. Her father’s continuous disregard for the health and safety of his children, her mother’s willingness to go along with her father’s endangerment, her brother’s psychopathic abuse and her parents’ willingness to ignore it- all of this was really hard to read. I was especially bothered by the ending, where Tara describes how successful her mother’s business selling homemade ‘tinctures’ has become, and how her parents continue to insist that she is to blame for any discord by her raising of abuse allegations. These people, who by any Darwinian law should have been killed in any number of accidents of their own making, are not only surviving but thriving. I know that Educated is often compared to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, but the comparison I kept coming back to was Jeanette Wells’ The Glass Castle– I found this less of a debate on the differences between rural and urban, and more of an example of shockingly bad parenting.