Educated: A Memoir

Some readers might perceive that Westover’s education did not begin until she went off to college at BYU. The question, “What does it mean to be educated?” is central to Westover’s memoir, and she seems to posit that a person can receive many and multiple educations throughout their lives. And all these educations mold a person into who they are.

When Gene makes the choice to keep his children out of public school and away from the reach of “the Illuminati,” it appears that he is making the choice not to educate his children. But it becomes clear that both Gene and Faye believe that they are giving their children a better education by keeping them out of school. Both Faye and Gene claim that they homeschool the children, but the education Westover remembers receiving at home is far different from traditional homeschooling methods in the United States. They rarely hold school consistently, and when they do, Faye leaves the children on their own for several hours and gives them no direct instruction. Westover remembers only having a few outdated textbooks on a shelf in the basement. When Faye would send the children off with books to study, Westover would just flip through the pages without doing or reading anything. More often than not, Gene would interrupt “school” and insist that the children should be out in the junkyard working for him. Eventually, Faye stopped holding school altogether.

The way Westover sees it, however, homeschool stopping did not mean that her education at home stopped. She learned an array of unique skills and practices working for her father in the junkyard and assisting her mother with her midwifing duties. Although she did not learn the things that she would have learned in formal schooling, Westover learned, nevertheless. The things she learned on the mountain shaped her as a person, and they shaped her into a specific person.

Leaving home and starting college, then, was not just a process of learning new things; it was a process of unlearning as well. This process was a key part of Westover’s education. As her mind grew, her experiences accumulated, and her choices solidified, Westover’s person changed. The shape her person had taken through her education on the mountain morphed through her education out in the world; she became a “changed person, a new self” (330). This is what Westover calls an education: the process of transformation or metamorphosis that occurs as people experience life and make sense of it. And both of her educations—the one she received at home on the mountain, and the one she received out in the world—participated in that transforming process. For Westover, their significance did not lie in their rightness or wrongness, but in the fact that they shaped who she has become. 

A consistent feature of Westover’s memoir is her acknowledgment that her memories are not sovereign. At the end of multiple chapters and even at the end of the book as a whole, Westover includes notes telling the reader that several different family members have conflicting memories of what occurred during a particular event, especially traumatic ones, like Shawn’s fall and head injury and Luke’s severe burn. Westover describes the various memories of these events, and rather than deny the validity of others’ memories and attempt to justify her own, she instead argues that memories can be messy. It seems she wants to emphasize that her memories are one version of reality, a single perspective on what happened—or may have happened—in a situation.

This emphasis on the fickleness of memory—its occasional unreliability—and the stories it produces is part of Westover’s response to her fundamentalist upbringing, in which there was always only one version of reality, and that version was always infallible and inerrant. It is as if she is telling the reader that she does not want to repeat the crimes of the past she remembers by claiming that she, herself, has the infallible and inerrant interpretation of a past that does not belong solely to her. This may be a response to her father’s constant insistence that all realities that did not correspond with his were dangerous and needed to be stamped out. In addition to rejecting the fundamentalist beliefs of her upbringing, Westover seeks to dismantle the intellectual framework that enabled them.

It is through these notes that Westover provides an overarching comment on the nature of memory and story. She reminds readers that stories are shared among people, and that stories about people can sometimes undercut the complexity and richness of who those people are: “We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories” (335). In claiming the truthfulness of this complexity over the truthfulness of her version of events, Westover encourages readers to approach her story and the people in it charitably, and to carry charitable readings of all stories with them into the future.