A Memoir of Tara Westover (Essay Sample)

A Memoir of Tara Westover

Before exploring this theme, it is prudent to give a summary of the memoir. To begin with, Tara Westover crafts an incredible picture of her family together with herself in Educated. In the entire writing, she explicates her father’s fundamentalist belief coupled with a crippling paranoia regarding the public school system. All through, the young Tara remains at the mercy of her parents’ power struggles. While she acknowledges the intense religiosity of her father, she has to embrace them as her own to become an outward convict worldly corruption. As she comes of age, Tara reminisces the past atrocities at the hands of her brother Shawn. Consequently, she becomes mentally and physically destabilized by an array of incidents prevailing in her father’s scrapyard.
Despite pursuing education eventually, followed by admission to the prestigious Brigham Young University, Westover notices her obviousness of the world. Once in control of her surroundings, including the scrapyard and the farm, she is confronted by a diverse world where she is entirely naive. Unaware of the Holocaust and her pathetic personal hygiene, she is engrossed in personal tensions with her predominantly secular roommates. Delving deeper into the world of academic reality, she secures scholarly escapades at Harvard and Cambridge. Westover is conscious that any degree she acquires makes it intricate to return to Idaho, where she led a humble life. As her father ages and weakens, she is aware of the power wielded by her brother Shawn. Also, she is cognizant of the memories held by the women in her family that she has not forfeited the history of abuse and the fear that she may speak about it altogether. Accepting the scars of her past life in the guise of lifelong education, Westover weaves a tale of questioning the subjectivity of memory, the truth of transformation, and what education implies for an individual.
Educated spans education and identity as one strives to find meaning and purpose. Even though this journey can sometimes be shrouded in loss and despair, it is worthwhile. Westover transitions from her life in Idaho together with her large family. Here, the major obstacle is encased in her father’s loathing of the public education system, preferring to teach his children independently. Westover’s father owns a junkyard to compliment her mother’s midwife role. According to Freed, the humble beginnings saw Westover and her siblings collect herbs to make various medicinal concoctions (832). Due to Westover’s identity laced with isolation as a girl growing in the remote town of Idaho, her siblings are uneducated, a standing that subjects them to ridicule. In what constitutes a move towards identity and purpose, one of her older brothers leaves home to attend college after several years of desperation.
Having learned of the intrigues of the outside world, he motivates his sister, Westover, to follow suit in this transformation. Taking the challenge by working hard to go to the university is indicative of her zeal to change the identity of her home. As she quotes, “Getting an education had changed me. I couldn’t go forward, because my parents couldn’t go forward with me, and I couldn’t go back, because that person didn’t exist anymore” (Westover 132). At college, she learns about several world events, which would have remained unknown to her. Encompassing incidents that she had never heard before, such as the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement, her naivety of these events inspires her classmates to consider her racist and insensitive.