Educated Read online

  Educated is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2018 by Second Sally, Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAMES: Westover, Tara, author.

  TITLE: Educated : a memoir / Tara Westover.

  DESCRIPTION: New York : Random House, [2018]

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2017037645 | ISBN 9780399590504 | ISBN 9780399590511 (ebook)

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: Westover, Tara—Family. | Women—Idaho—Biography. | Survivalism—Idaho—Biography. | Home schooling—Idaho—Anecdotes. | Women college students—United States—Biography. | Victims of family violence—Idaho—Biography. | Subculture—Idaho. | Christian biography. | Idaho—Rural conditions—Anecdotes. | Idaho—Biography.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC CT3262.I2 W47 2018 | DDC 270.092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2017037645

  International ISBN 9780525510673

  Ebook ISBN 9780399590511

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover illustration: Patrik Svensson

  v5.2

  ep

  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

  The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF

  I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.

  —JOHN DEWEY

  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 India
ns 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.

  * Except for my sister Audrey, who broke both an arm and a leg when she was young. She was taken to get a cast.

  PART ONE

  My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened. The memory was formed when I was five, just before I turned six, from a story my father told in such detail that I and my brothers and sister had each conjured our own cinematic version, with gunfire and shouts. Mine had crickets. That’s the sound I hear as my family huddles in the kitchen, lights off, hiding from the Feds who’ve surrounded the house. A woman reaches for a glass of water and her silhouette is lighted by the moon. A shot echoes like the lash of a whip and she falls. In my memory it’s always Mother who falls, and she has a baby in her arms.

  The baby doesn’t make sense—I’m the youngest of my mother’s seven children—but like I said, none of this happened.

  * * *

  —

  A YEAR AFTER MY FATHER told us that story, we gathered one evening to hear him read aloud from Isaiah, a prophecy about Immanuel. He sat on our mustard-colored sofa, a large Bible open in his lap. Mother was next to him. The rest of us were strewn across the shaggy brown carpet.

  “Butter and honey shall he eat,” Dad droned, low and monotone, weary from a long day hauling scrap. “That he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.”

  There was a heavy pause. We sat quietly.

  My father was not a tall man but he was able to command a room. He had a presence about him, the solemnity of an oracle. His hands were thick and leathery—the hands of a man who’d been hard at work all his life—and they grasped the Bible firmly.

  He read the passage aloud a second time, then a third, then a fourth. With each repetition the pitch of his voice climbed higher. His eyes, which moments before had been swollen with fatigue, were now wide and alert. There was a divine doctrine here, he said. He would inquire of the Lord.

  The next morning Dad purged our fridge of milk, yogurt and cheese, and that evening when he came home, his truck was loaded with fifty gallons of honey.

  “Isaiah doesn’t say which is evil, butter or honey,” Dad said, grinning as my brothers lugged the white tubs to the basement. “But if you ask, the Lord will tell you!”

  When Dad read the verse to his mother, she laughed in his face. “I got some pennies in my purse,” she said. “You better take them. They’ll be all the sense you got.”

  Grandma had a thin, angular face and an endless store of faux Indian jewelry, all silver and turquoise, which hung in clumps from her spindly neck and fingers. Because she lived down the hill from us, near the highway, we called her Grandma-down-the-hill. This was to distinguish her from our mother’s mother, who we called Grandma-over-in-town because she lived fifteen miles south, in the only town in the county, which had a single stoplight and a grocery store.

  Dad and his mother got along like two cats with their tails tied together. They could talk for a week and not agree about anything, but they were tethered by their devotion to the mountain. My father’s family had been living at the base of Buck’s Peak for half a century. Grandma’s daughters had married and moved away, but my father stayed, building a shabby yellow house, which he would never quite finish, just up the hill from his mother’s, at the base of the mountain, and plunking a junkyard—one of several—next to her manicured lawn.

  They argued daily, about the mess from the junkyard but more often about us kids. Grandma thought we should be in school and not, as she put it, “roaming the mountain like savages.” Dad said public school was a ploy by the Government to lead children away from God. “I may as well surrender my kids to the devil himself,” he said, “as send them down the road to that school.”

  God told Dad to share the revelation with the people who lived and farmed in the shadow of Buck’s Peak. On Sundays, nearly everyone gathered at the church, a hickory-colored chapel just off the highway with the small, restrained steeple common to Mormon churches. Dad cornered fathers as they left their pews. He started with his cousin Jim, who listened good-naturedly while Dad waved his Bible and explained the sinfulness of milk. Jim grinned, then clapped Dad on the shoulder and said no righteous God would deprive a man of homemade strawberry ice cream on a hot summer afternoon. Jim’s wife tugged on his arm. As he slid past us I caught a whiff of manure. Then I remembered: the big dairy farm a mile north of Buck’s Peak, that was Jim’s.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER DAD TOOK UP preaching against milk, Grandma jammed her fridge full of it. She and Grandpa only drank skim but pretty soon it was all there—two percent, whole, even chocolate. She seemed to believe this was an important line to hold.

  Breakfast became a test of loyalty. Every morning, my family sat around a large table of reworked red oak and ate either seven-grain cereal, with honey and molasses, or seven-grain pancakes, also with honey and molasses. Because there were nine of us, the pancakes were never cooked all the way through. I didn’t mind the cereal if I could soak it in milk, letting the cream gather up the grist and seep into the pellets, but since the revelation we’d been having it with water. It was like eating a bowl of mud.

  It wasn’t long before I began to think of all that milk spoiling in Grandma’s fridge. Then I got into the habit of skipping breakfast each morning and going straight to the barn. I’d slop the pigs and fill the trough for the cows and horses, then I’d hop over the corral fence, loop around the barn and step through Grandma’s side door.

  On one such morning, as I sat at the counter watching Grandma pour a bowl of cornflakes, she said, “How would you like to go to school?”

  “I wouldn’t like it,” I said.

  “How do you know,” she barked. “You ain’t never tried it.”

  She poured the milk and handed me the bowl, then she perched at the bar, directly across from me, and watched as I shoveled spoonfuls into my mouth.

  “We’re leaving tomorrow for Arizona,” she told me, but I already knew. She and Grandpa always went to Arizona when the weather began to turn. Grandpa said he was too old for Idaho winters; the cold put an ache in his bones. “Get yourself up real early,” Grandma said, “around five, and we’ll take you with us. Put you in school.”

  I shifted on my stool. I tried to imagine school but couldn’t. Instead I pictured Sunday school, which I attended each week and which I hated. A boy named Aaron had told all the girls that I couldn’t read because I didn’t go to school, and now none of them would talk to me.

  “Dad said I can go?” I said.

  “No,” Grandma said. “But we’ll be long gone by the time he realizes you’re missing.” She set my bowl in the sink and gazed out the window.

  Grandma was a force of nature—impatient, aggressive, self-possessed. To look at her was to take a step back. She dyed her hair black and this intensified her already severe features, especially her eyebrows, which she smeared on each morning in thick, inky arches. She drew them too large and this made her face seem stretched. They were also drawn too high and draped the rest of her features into an expression of boredom, almost sarcasm.

  “You should be in school,” she said.

  “Won’t Dad just make you bring me back?” I said.

  “Your dad can’t make me do a damned thing.” Grandma stood, squaring herself. “If he wants you, he’ll have to come get you.” She hesitated, and for a moment looked ashamed. “I talked to him yesterday. He won’t be able to fetch you back for a long while. He’s behind on that shed he’s building in town. He can’t pack u
p and drive to Arizona, not while the weather holds and he and the boys can work long days.”

  Grandma’s scheme was well plotted. Dad always worked from sunup until sundown in the weeks before the first snow, trying to stockpile enough money from hauling scrap and building barns to outlast the winter, when jobs were scarce. Even if his mother ran off with his youngest child, he wouldn’t be able to stop working, not until the forklift was encased in ice.

  “I’ll need to feed the animals before we go,” I said. “He’ll notice I’m gone for sure if the cows break through the fence looking for water.”

  * * *

  —

  I DIDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. I sat on the kitchen floor and watched the hours tick by. One A.M. Two. Three.

  At four I stood and put my boots by the back door. They were caked in manure, and I was sure Grandma wouldn’t let them into her car. I pictured them on her porch, abandoned, while I ran off shoeless to Arizona.

  I imagined what would happen when my family discovered I was missing. My brother Richard and I often spent whole days on the mountain, so it was likely no one would notice until sundown, when Richard came home for dinner and I didn’t. I pictured my brothers pushing out the door to search for me. They’d try the junkyard first, hefting iron slabs in case some stray sheet of metal had shifted and pinned me. Then they’d move outward, sweeping the farm, crawling up trees and into the barn attic. Finally, they’d turn to the mountain.