Educated: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Tara’s mother, Faye, was a mailman’s daughter and grew up in town in a “yellow house with a white picket fence.” Her mother, a seamstress (whom Tara and her siblings all call Grandma-over-in-town) sewed her beautiful clothes for church and school, and Faye and her family’s life “had an air of intense order, normalcy, and unassailable respectability.”

Grandma-over-in-town herself had come from a family seen as the “wrong kind” by many others in her pious Mormon community, and spent her life trying to give Faye an easier entry into the social world of their small town and “shield her” from “social contempt.” Tara believes that due to this strict, prim upbringing, Faye rebelled, and married Gene—a man with an “appetite for unconventionality.” Faye rejected her mother’s attempts at instilling respectability and normalcy in her, and instead swung in the other direction, rebelling against the upbringing she saw as materialistic and claustrophobic. Tara remembers her mother telling her a story about Grandma-over-in-town spending hours deliberating about whether to put the young Faye in white or cream shoes for church one morning.

Tara knows very little, on the other hand, about her father’s childhood. She knows that despite the views he developed about women’s duties to homemaking and family, Grandma-down-the-hill actually worked in town while he was growing up, and that Gene spent a good deal of time in town, too—Gene and Faye met at a local bowling alley. Tara believes that Faye, sick of “contorting herself” for other people all her life, was attracted to the “sense of sovereignty” over his own life Gene had, a sovereignty that came with living life on a mountain.

Growing up, Tara and her sibling understood that “the dissolution of Mother’s family was the inauguration” of their own. Dad rarely even set foot in Grandma-over-in-town and Grandpa-over-in-town’s house, and Faye’s parents hardly ever visited the mountain.

Looking at pictures of her parents on their wedding day, the young Tara often wondered about how the “untroubled young man” in the picture became the Dad she knew. She is unsure of how he went from being “eccentric and unconventional” out of a desire to shock others to being controlling, paranoid, and obsessed with hoarding food and supplies for the End of Days. The older Tara reflects on how, during a college lecture years later, she heard a professor describe the symptoms of bipolar disorder and immediately thought of her father.

The older Tara reflects, too, on the recent death of Grandma-over-in-town. She attended the memorial despite tensions with her family, and as she looked down into her grandmother’s open casket, she lamented that “the only person who might have understood” her difficult childhood was kept at arm’s length while “paranoia and fundamentalism” slowly destroyed Tara’s life—and Faye’s.