The Long Shadow of Family
Memoir often feels like a powerful act of reclamation — an individual rising above their unique, often challenging, circumstances. Educated by Tara Westover is one of these knock-me-down tales.
I’m not sure at what point in my life my love of memoirs bloomed. Perhaps it’s always been there, ready to be watered and nurtured and grown. I hail from a family that was made for memoir, after all. Absurd family vacations Griswold-style, with my father — a real-life Clark W. — at the wheel of our wood-paneled station wagon. There are enough cringe-inducing and hilarious tales from those adventures for a book. Someday! And my beloved-but-persnickety maternal grandmother, June. We affectionately call her Grambo, as in Grandmom plus a sprinkling of John Rambo for spice. She earns every bit of her nickname. Truth can be a hell of a lot stranger than fiction. While I include many fiction titles on my favorite books list, nothing grabs me quite like a family memoir.
When I read a work of fiction, my brain knows it’s made up, and my inner-critic ratchets up the volume. This happens despite my genuine enjoyment of an affecting, emotional, funny, or rage-inducing story. With memoir, the trust between reader and author is part of my allure. I’m getting to know someone, intimately. They aren’t putting on airs — at least, that’s the contract we’ve entered into. They have invited me into the recreated reality of their life, and it sparks my curiosity and empathy. Fiction — especially when I can’t stand the protagonist — brings out the judgmental nag in me. Strife and trauma in fiction sometimes feel gratuitous to me, whereas those same elements in a memoir feel precisely right. Talented fiction writers make up incredible fantasy, build worlds, brilliantly describe the oddest of odd tales, yet a memoir is the tale that has the power to elicit both “holy shit!” and “amen” from this reader. There is also a redemptive quality to memoir, for the reader, and I’d hope for the author as well. Memoir often feels like a powerful act of reclamation — an individual rising above their unique, often challenging, circumstances.
Educated by Tara Westover is one of these knock-me-down tales. Having devoured every word of Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle a few years ago, and after seeing a review that referenced Wall’s story, I was excited to crack open Westover’s book. Their stories are quite different, but what they have in common is a father figure in which the entire family unit orbits around. Both men are “magical thinkers,” not glued to the reality that most of us recognize, and who, if they’d been diagnosed, would be on the spectrum of a range of mental illnesses. While Walls’ father, Rex, was flighty, off-center, and whose big, irrational dreams were fueled by alcoholism, Westover’s father, Val, was a Mormon fundamentalist, with a survivalist bent, intent on prepping for end days, running from “the Illuminati.” Both the Walls and the Westover families operated outside of societal norms. Walls’ family was getting ready to strike it rich, dreaming big, and moving to and fro like the wind in Appalachia. Addiction, poverty, and homelessness were the threads of the Walls’ family. The Westovers of Idaho were preparing for the government to take them out, avoiding doctors and school. Abuse, both emotional and physical, figure prominently in the Westover story.
Tara’s story is difficult and painful to read, even stomach-turning. She and her six siblings are effectively cut off from the outside world. They don’t go to school. Their home environment is one of misogyny and fundamentalism. They all work from a very young age for their father in a scrap metal yard. Their mother is a midwife and herbalist, so anything from a paper cut to bleeding from the ears is treated at home. Fire and twisted metal are apt metaphors for Tara’s childhood. Westover describes the various injuries she and her siblings and father sustained at the hands of the metal heap. Her brother Shawn lived through two harrowing traumatic head injuries. Her father was almost burned alive in one accident. Her brother Luke also suffered a terrible burn, almost losing his leg. A car accident left her mother on the brink of death, and a month of recovering without medical intervention left her with permanent brain damage. In the most gut-wrenching scenes, Tara describes her brother Shawn physically abusing her while in earshot of her mother. After which, Shawn would apologize, and Tara would rationalize it away in her journal. She remembered it wrong: how could it be possible that her brother was abusing her and that her family was complicit?
The core of Tara’s story is about education or her act of stumbling her way into getting one despite almost insurmountable odds. As a kid, she taught herself to read. As a teen, she felt compelled to take the ACT/SAT, so she taught herself geometry, algebra, and calculus. This, all under the dark cloud of her father screaming about her exposure to “the Illuminati.” Whether she was driven by some unseen force, or she simply had enough courage to just take it one step at a time, she not only got a college degree from BYU, but she earned an MPhil and a Ph.D. from Cambridge, with a visiting fellowship from Harvard thrown in for flavor. Throw-away schools these are not! In one poignant, cringe-worthy passage, she recalls sitting in a European history class at BYU, as her professor discussed the Holocaust. Tara asked the question, “What does ‘holocaust’ mean?” Her words dropped like a ton of bricks in the lecture hall. Her surprise and eventual shame at the reaction of the class and the professor was all-encompassing. Her love of learning was strong, and this episode left her with even more determined to fill in the enormous gaps in her knowledge.
Tara’s story is not only about book-bound education, but also profoundly about the education of self. Who am I? What do I believe? What is my story? Her education eventually cost her her family. First, through distance and disapproval. Once Tara embraced her “self” through an exploration of the possibilities that existed outside of her indoctrination, her father disowned her as a conduit of the devil and her family followed.
“In families like mine, there is no crime worse than telling the truth.”
In her final chapters, as Tara comes to terms with her familial loss, she begins to realize that this separation was necessary for her to gain her own life. Her real, questioning self could not exist within the parameters of her family narrative. This can be the reality in families of all kinds - from the well-adjusted to the Westovers. A great many of us have to get out from under our families' shadows to have agency in our own lives. In most cases, it’s an exercise in establishing boundaries. But for Tara, it meant actually renouncing her father, effectively cutting herself off from the rest of her family unit. In this profound passage she explains her evolution,
“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. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
Tara’s story brings to light the weight of personal history on all of us. Some of us wear it like a ball and chain and let it bog us down. It’s up to us to unbound ourselves so that we can charge headlong into our futures, not a future written for us by others. Realizing that she had full command over how she proceeded into her future, Tara wrote, “The past was a ghost, insubstantial, unaffecting. Only the future had weight.”
“The past was a ghost, insubstantial, unaffecting. Only the future had weight.”
Both authors at the center of The Glass Castle and Educated managed to step out from the long shadows of their families and became proprietors of their own lives. Walls and Westover are both thriving and successful writers. On my own writing awakening of sorts, I couldn’t help but wonder if the act of writing was the linchpin that pulled Jeannette and Tara out of their families and into themselves. Whatever their catalysts were, I enjoyed both books as a reminder of the power of story in shaping our lives.
