Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
This story is not about Mormonism. Neither is it about any other form of religious belief. In it there are many types of people, some believers, some not; some kind, some not. The author disputes any correlation, positive or negative, between the two.
The following names, listed in alphabetical order, are pseudonyms: Aaron, Audrey, Benjamin, Emily, Erin, Faye, Gene, Judy, Peter, Robert, Robin, Sadie, Shannon, Shawn, Susan, Vanessa.
I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn. The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt. The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling. Down below, the valley is peaceful, undisturbed. Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver, bowing before every puff and pocket of air. Behind me a gentle hill slopes upward and stitches itself to the mountain base. If I look up, I can see the dark form of the Indian Princess.
The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind.
Turning toward our house on the hillside, I see movements of a different kind, tall shadows stiffly pushing through the currents. My brothers are awake, testing the weather. I imagine my mother at the stove, hovering over bran pancakes. I picture my father hunched by the back door, lacing his steel-toed boots and threading his callused hands into welding gloves. On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping.
I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.
Dad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse.* We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist.
Of course I did exist. I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.
I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.
There’s a story my father used to tell about the peak. She was a grand old thing, a cathedral of a mountain. The range had other mountains, taller, more imposing, but Buck’s Peak was the most finely crafted. Its base spanned a mile, its dark form swelling out of the earth and rising into a flawless spire. From a distance, you could see the impression of a woman’s body on the mountain face: her legs formed of huge ravines, her hair a spray of pines fanning over the northern ridge. Her stance was commanding, one leg thrust forward in a powerful movement, more stride than step.
My father called her the Indian Princess. She emerged each year when the snows began to melt, facing south, watching the buffalo return to the valley. Dad said the nomadic Indians had watched for her appearance as a sign of spring, a signal the mountain was thawing, winter was over, and it was time to come home.
All my father’s stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how I’d know when it was time to come home.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1: Choose the Good
Chapter 2: The Midwife
Chapter 3: Cream Shoes
Chapter 4: Apache Women
Chapter 5: Honest Dirt
Chapter 6: Shield and Buckler
Chapter 7: The Lord Will Provide
Chapter 8: Tiny Harlots
Chapter 9: Perfect in His Generations
Chapter 10: Shield of Feathers
Chapter 11: Instinct
Chapter 12: Fish Eyes
Chapter 13: Silence in the Churches
Chapter 14: My Feet No Longer Touch Earth
Chapter 15: No More a Child
Chapter 16: Disloyal Man, Disobedient Heaven
Part Two
Chapter 17: To Keep It Holy
Chapter 18: Blood and Feathers
Chapter 19: In the Beginning
Chapter 20: Recitals of the Fathers
Chapter 21: Skullcap
Chapter 22: What We Whispered and What We Screamed
Chapter 23: I’m from Idaho
Chapter 24: A Knight, Errant
Chapter 25: The Work of Sulphur
Chapter 26: Waiting for Moving Water
Chapter 27: If I Were a Woman
Chapter 28: Pygmalion
Chapter 29: Graduation
Part Three
Chapter 30: Hand of the Almighty
Chapter 31: Tragedy Then Farce
Chapter 32: A Brawling Woman in a Wide House
Chapter 33: Sorcery of Physics
Chapter 34: The Substance of Things
Chapter 35: West of the Sun
Chapter 36: Four Long Arms, Whirling
Chapter 37: Gambling for Redemption
Chapter 38: Family
Chapter 39: Watching the Buffalo
Chapter 40: Educated
Dedication
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Text
About the Author
