And I also learned to then walk back into my own life as a confident, capable adult. I learned to send warmth and love to her to provide support that maybe she wasn’t getting back then. A key part of it was imagining my younger me and realising that I wasn’t that girl anymore. About five years ago, I had EMDR therapy to deal with some experiences in my childhood. I thought of my own younger self as I read Educated. To create a new life, you have to say goodbye to your younger self. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. 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 you stood out like a sore (bookish) thumb in your family too, I expect you will like this quote:Įverything 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. Homeschooling is a very loose term for her early education – self-education seems more applicable – but Tara’s older brother, Tyler, got into college and came back to tell his siblings of the world beyond the mountain.

She also salvaged metal in her father’s junkyard with her brothers, which led to burns, breaks, gashes, and concussions and were treated herbally at home, with few exceptions.

Instead of school, she helped her mother, a midwife and healer, to brew and sell herbal remedies. Tara Westover was brought up in the mountains of Idaho, where her family prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches, guns, fuel and packing “head-for-the-hills” bags. But he doesn’t have many other things in common, and especially not a Mormon survivalist upbringing.

He has postgraduate education in common with the author, Tara Westover. I’ll try with this: I was recommended the book by my boyfriend, who is studying for a Ph.D. How do I start talking about Educated by Tara Westover? When you buy through these links, I may earn a commission.

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Something More Boxed Set by Tara West