Tara Westover's memoir, Educated, is a hot book now... I had to purchase a copy to read for tonight's Music Hall book group discussion because it was out or on hold at every library in Maine that carried it! And that is a good thing. This is a very painful book. The simple story is one of a girl finding herself and her life via education. But of course that is far too simple. Tara was born one of many children in the vastness and isolation of Idaho into a life full of conflict and much cruelty. Only part of this is attributed to her Morman background, much of it to a father she later comes to understand is bipolar and delusional, swinging wildly through moods of gentleness, logic, paranoia and outright viciousness, seconded only by one of her brothers. Meanwhile mom left a stable Morman home to become progressively integrated into her husband's survivalist mentality all while becoming more and more well-known for her herbal concoctions and abilities to heal outside the much mistrusted medical establishment. Several of the family members suffer near fatal accidents but survive through her ministrations, adding to the parents' beliefs in their righteous path and special consideration by God. Into all this is the fact that the children (at least the last four) are not allowed to attend public school and are only spottily homeschooled. Tara is greatly and positively influenced by a an older brother Tyler, who pushed her to educate herself and follow his path out of the family against all odds. Not only did she amazingly (I refuse to say miraculously....) survive what could have been fatal situations into which her father pushed her in the scrapyard where he made her work, she managed to pass the ACT exam with no official schooling, be admitted to Brigham Young, earn a scholarship to Cambridge and later to Harvard. It is clear that every member (or at least most of them) are walking the line between devastating mental illness or genius... of which Tara is the latter. Even so, it is painful to see how embedded is the brainwashing in her early environment and how desperate the struggle to reconcile the necessary distancing from a family she loves and wants to remain a part of with the new understanding of the world she is absorbing along the way. She does write beautifully, so it is a lovely book to read even if it made me cringe for her and for the horrors visited upon children by their families. Her early years at BYU astound you; failure after failure (how do you ask questions when you don't have enough background to follow?) yet she keeps at it. An outcast at all levels, but a genius nonetheless. "...what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others." There are so many quotes to nourish your reading soul, but this is long enough, so I just encourage you to read this one.

on the bench near the entrances