Memoirs and memory

May was a pretty good month for reading for me. Not that I read copious amounts, but what I read was really good. I finished two very different books - Educated by Tara Westover, the bestseller about the girl who went from apparently no education to a Harvard Ph.D., and The River Why by David James Duncan, an odd book about fishing, philosophizing, and finding faith that I had seen recommended on lists of books for my nature writing class but had never encountered. - Saving that for another post...

I was on the library's wait list for Westover's memoir for several months. After finishing it in a few days, I'm not surprised that it is on the bestseller list.  Westover tells a good story and tells it well.  It's thoughtful and heartfelt and fascinating - I kept wanting to find out what crazy thing would happen next in her family.  (I also read Wired for Story this month, which posits that the most important part of writing is tantalizing your audience with the prospect of what's on the next page.)

Westover has a fascinating background, which is familiar to readers of book reviews: her parents are Mormon survivalists who live on a farm in Idaho and run a scrapyard and now an essential oils business. The story begins with an account of her mother becoming a midwife, so she can help other mothers give birth at home. The parents are skeptical of the government, the medical establishment, the educational system. The younger four of the seven children don't have birth certificates and never go to school. The father regularly puts the children in danger by employing them in the scrapyard, where several are injured, including a son who is severely burned, and himself. His recovery from severe burns is the catalyst that enables the family to make millions from essential oils. He doesn't go to the doctor, but instead is healed by the used of salves and balms that his wife makes and administers to him.  She was severely injured herself in one of two bad car accidents caused by the father falling asleep at the wheel while driving at night.

These are the incidents that keep the reader turning pages. There is also the minor drama of Tara's coming of age - she has a beautiful voice and is allowed to take dance and music lessons and participate in musical theater, even though she doesn't go to school. The father suffers a couple mental breakdowns, and she later realizes he suffers from psychiatric disorders. And then there is the major drama of the older brother beating and berating his sisters.  Fear and frustration over these interactions are part of what eventually propel Tara to apply to college and leave home.

Despite the family's suspicion of the government and other public institutions, they don't forbid Tara from going to school. They have a computer and internet, which she uses for finding out about BYU. Her older brother who has also gone to college helps her study for the ACT. None of this causes a large rift in the family. And while Tara attends BYU, she comes home regularly, even as she begins to question the way she was raised.

I would warn about spoilers ahead, but I think all the press about the book has revealed the end of the story.  Tara goes on to do extremely well at Brigham Young University and gets a fellowship to study at Cambridge for a year. A don there encourages her to continue her studies of history, and she eventually attends Harvard as a visiting scholar and earns a Ph.D. from Cambridge.  Although she claims not to have received much if any education at home (and suggests she didn't know what the Holocaust was when she first attended a lecture on it at BYU), she apparently can write and read and think well enough to earn degrees from prestigious universities. She is a prodigy, as are two of her brothers, who also have Ph.D.'s.

While she is away at school, her family has phenomenal success selling essential oils and profiting from her mother's energy healing business. The family home is expanded and help is hired, so people are in and out of the house all the time. For many years, Tara stays connected with her family, but after she accuses her brother of abuse and tries to get his wife and her sister to speak up about the way they were abused by him, too, she is cut off from the family.  Her father, sister, and two brothers no longer talk to her, and her mother won't see her until she reconciles with her father. This causes her great pain, even though she struggled to move away and sees harm in the way she was raised.

After I finished the book, I was curious about the rest of the story, so I went to the trusty internet to find out the name of the family essential oil company and what happened after this book that reveals so many intimate secrets and complex relationships was published.  The family business wasn't familiar to me, although that's not surprising. I found many glowing reviews and interviews with Tara about her story.  Obama and Oprah praised it.

There is also a statement on Goodreads by one of the brothers who Tara appealed to for help writing the book. He claims that the story is Tara's and that her memories don't entirely match his own.  He notes several events he remembers differently, including his brother's burns and his other brother's traumatic accident at a building site.  And Westover does note these discrepancies in the book. She includes not just footnotes but also paragraphs about how certain events - like her brother's burns - are remembered differently by everyone who was there.

There is also a letter from the family's lawyer that claims that Westover exaggerates her lack of schooling. It points out how three of the kids have advanced degrees, and how the other children are successful at what they do, and it connects this success with the family's home school.  It claims she has exaggerated the arguments with her brother. The letter doesn't accuse Westover of libel, and there is no lawsuit, but it does claim that her memory is faulty.

These postscripts add another layer of meaning to the story. On the one hand, the book is fascinating because the characters are unusual and extreme.  Crazy things happen to them. And yet this girl -  and her brothers - manage to have incredible success.  And for a number of years, she wants to come home. She loves the mountain she grew up on and she craves attention and love from her parents.  As I read, I was surprised she would spend any time alone with her abusive brother, and yet she does. She wants her father's love and attention, even as she acknowledges he is mentally ill. She shows up from overseas for family events.  She doesn't want to be alienated from her family, even though she isn't willing to swear she is possessed by demons.

As I read, I also wondered how she managed to do so well in college. Almost no details are given about her mother teaching the children, but some of them are able to read and write well.  This discrepancy either makes Westover's achievements nearly miraculous, or it causes the reader to question whether she is telling the whole story about her education.

But memory is another fascinating theme. In our own family, the kids either don't remember things or remember them quite differently.  They say things about the past that are a conglomeration of different stories or that leave out great big details. Their stories shift as time goes by. My husband remembers me saying things that I swear I never said - perhaps he interpreted something I said as meaning something different from what I intended.  My own siblings and I have different perspectives on things that happened when we were growing up.  Sometimes I wonder if we were at the same place at the same time.

Memory is unreliable.  It seems as if memory has a great deal to do with personality and perspective.  Does the truth of history belong to the person who tells it first and tells it best?  Or is the best option to consult different sources and knit together some relatively reliable account of events based on probabilities and similarities between stories? 

The difficulty of knowing what is actually true vs. what is true for Tara Westover's story is impossible to determine. And perhaps unnecessary, especially if her story is taken just to be an interesting read and a meditation on the way education occurs and its effects on individuals.