Educated

by

Tara Westover

Memory, History, and Subjectivity Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Memory, History, and Subjectivity Theme Icon
Learning and Education Theme Icon
Devoutness and Delusion Theme Icon
Family, Abuse, and Entrapment Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Educated, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, History, and Subjectivity Theme Icon

“My strongest memory is not a memory,” begins Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated. Though the book is a carefully written history of Westover’s childhood of growing up in a family of Mormon fundamentalists, she admits outright that memory is tricky and subjective—and therefore, she argues, so is the history of one’s life and one’s family. Throughout the book, Westover argues that both personal memory and family history are subjective things, perceived differently by different people. Using her own warped memories, family members’ varying accounts of incidents she’d taken for granted as true, and the campaign of paranoia and misinformation her father, Gene, fed her family for decades, Westover argues that when it comes to family history and personal memory, there is no one unifying truth—everything exists in shades of gray.

The early pages of Educated demonstrate the lies and cover-ups that formed the bedrock of Tara’s childhood. Because so much of her family’s truth—and indeed the truth of the world beyond her rural Idaho town—was kept from her at a young age, Tara experienced the world as other than what it was. To Tara and her family, doctors were evil, the government was conspiring against them, and the end of the world was just around the corner. She even remembers the infamous Ruby Ridge incident—a nationally spotlighted event in which a family of survivalists much like the Westovers became locked in an FBI shootout—as having happened to her own family. Tara clung to the details her father told her about Ruby Ridge and rehearsed them in her head until they became part of her own personal history. This incident shows how Tara’s father’s strange mix of delusion, charisma, and paranoia affected the rest of his family. Because of his total control over what his children saw or didn’t see and learned or didn’t learn, Gene could manipulate even objective facts and bend them to his own narrative. This rocky foundation would come to affect the ways in which Tara, as well as the other members of her family, perceived and processed the major traumatic events that would mark their family’s history.

One of the major incidents Tara uses to deconstruct the ways in which her father’s warped view of the world actually affected her own sense of memory occurs when her older brother Luke’s leg catches fire during an accident at Gene’s scrap yard. Tara describes remembering the events of the mundane day leading up to the accident with “unsettling clarity,” but when it comes to the actual trauma of Luke’s accident, the details become fuzzy. Tara has trouble discerning which parts of the story she recalls because they have been told and retold “so many times [they have become] family folklore,” and which parts of the story are genuinely her own memories. She recalls watching a screaming Luke hobbling towards the house with “the jeans on his left leg […] gone, melted away” and tending to her brother’s third-degree burns by wrapping his leg in a trash bag and submerging it in a trash can filled with water. However, Luke’s memory differs from Tara’s—he remembers Dad bringing him down to the house from the scrap yard and putting him into a bath. In the end, unable to determine the full truth of what happened, Westover concedes that “perhaps [all] our memories are in error.” Westover uses this incident to highlight several important components of the way memory works throughout her memoir. Having established the shaky foundation between fact and fiction that underscored her and her family’s entire lives, she then relays an incident marked by trauma, confusion, and desperation. Here, she highlights both the complicated nature of memory itself, and how her family’s uneasy relationship to objective truth has, over the years, compounded their inability to come to a consensus about a major moment in their family’s history.

Toward the end of the book, as Tara and her sister Audrey seek to bring their brother Shawn to justice for the years of physical and emotional abuse he’s wrought—and continues to wreak against his defenseless young wife, Emily—memory, history, and subjectivity enter the narrative in a disturbing new way. Tara tries to make a case against Shawn by telling her parents about the horrible things he’s said to her about Audrey, the violence he’s perpetrated against old girlfriends, and the threats he’s made against Audrey and Tara’s own lives. Her parents refuse to see the truth about Shawn, and insist that without proof, Tara’s memories must be wrong. Even when Shawn brandishes a knife at Tara in front of their parents and threatens to kill her, they still refuse to see the truth. As a result, Tara begins falling into an intense emotional spiral in which she questions the facts she herself laid out in journal entries throughout her childhood. In the shadow of her parents’ doubt—and Shawn’s emotional manipulations—Tara begins questioning her own personal history and flailing in her academic and social life in England as a result. She’s only able to pull herself out of the tailspin when her brother Tyler speaks up to condemn Shawn’s actions and declare that he won’t accept the family’s manipulations any longer. With someone to vouch for her memories and validate them, Tara once again feels sane and supported.

Westover relays several more instances throughout the book in which she freely admits and accepts that her memory—and the memories of the family members she’s still in contact with—are fallible, imperfect things. She never directly blames her strange and isolated upbringing for the cracks and “ghosts” in her memories, but obliquely draws a connection between the campaign of misinformation that marked her childhood and her adult habit of questioning, doubting, and ultimately surrendering to the unknowability of her personal and family history.

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Memory, History, and Subjectivity Quotes in Educated

Below you will find the important quotes in Educated related to the theme of Memory, History, and Subjectivity.
Prologue Quotes

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountains, 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.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Indian Princess
Page Number: xii
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Dad had always believed passionately in Mother’s herbs, but that night felt different, like something inside him was shifting, a new creed taking hold. Herbalism, he said, was a spiritual doctrine that separated the wheat from the tares, the faithful from the faithless. Then he used a word I’d never heard before: Illuminati. It sounded exotic, powerful, whatever it was. Grandma, he said, was an unknowing agent of the Illuminati.

God couldn’t abide faithlessness, Dad said. That’s why the most hateful sinners were those who wouldn’t make up their minds, who used herbs and medication both, who came to Mother on Wednesday and saw their doctor on Friday—or, as Dad put it, “Who worship at the altar of God one day and offer a sacrifice to Satan the next.” These people were like the ancient Israelites because they’d been given a true religion but hankered after false idols.

“Doctors and pills,” Dad said, nearly shouting. “That’s their god, and they whore after it.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad (speaker), Faye Westover / Mother, Grandma-down-the-hill
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:

Me, I never blamed anyone for the accident, least of all Tyler. It was just one of those things. A decade later my understanding would shift, part of my heavy swing into adulthood, and after that the accident would always make me think of the Apache women, and of all the decisions that go into making a life—the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Tyler Westover
Page Number: 40
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Dad picked me up soon after on his way home from a job. He pulled up in his truck and honked for me to come out, which I did, my head bent low. Grandma followed. I rushed into the passenger seat, displacing a toolbox and welding gloves, while Grandma told Dad about my not washing. Dad listened, sucking on his cheeks while his right hand fiddled with the gearshift. A laugh was bubbling up inside him. Having returned to my father, I was taken by the power of his person. A familiar lens slid over my eyes and Grandma lost whatever strange power she’d had over me an hour before.

“Don’t you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?” Grandma said.

Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, “I teach them not to piss on their hands.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad (speaker), Grandma-over-in-town (speaker)
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Since the writing of [the story of Luke’s burn,] I have spoken to Luke about the incident. His account differs from both mine and Richard’s. In Luke’s memory, Dad took Luke to the house, administered a homeopathic for shock, then put him in a tub of cold water, where he left him to go fight the fire. This goes against my memory, and against Richard’s. Still, perhaps our memories are in error. Perhaps I found Luke in a tub, alone, rather than on the grass. What everyone agrees upon, strangely, is that somehow Luke ended up on the front lawn, his leg in a garbage can.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad, Richard Westover, Luke Westover
Page Number: 75
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

I waited for the screen to flicker and die. I was trying to take it all in, this last, luxurious moment—of sharp yellow light, of warm air flowing from the heater. I was experiencing nostalgia for the life I’d had before, which I would lose at any second, when the world turned and began to devour itself.

The longer I sat motionless, breathing deeply, trying to inhale the last scent of the fallen world, the more I resented its continuing solidity. […] Sometime after 1:30 I went to bed. I glimpsed Dad as I left, his face frozen in the dark, the light from the TV leaping across his square glasses.

He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark.

But God withheld the flood.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

“Shouldn’t we drive slower?” Mother asks.

Dad grins. “I’m not driving faster than our angels can fly.” The van is still accelerating. To fifty, then to sixty.

Richard sits tensely, his hand clutching the armrest, his knuckles bleaching each time the tires slip. Mother lies on her side, her face next to mine, taking small sips of air each time the van fishtails, then holding her breath as Dad corrects and it snakes back into the lane. She is so rigid, I think she might shatter. My body tenses with hers; together we brace a hundred times for impact.

It is a relief when the van finally leaves the road.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad (speaker), Faye Westover / Mother (speaker), Richard Westover
Page Number: 93-94
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

I stood and quietly locked the bathroom door, then I stared into the mirror at the girl clutching her wrist. Her eyes were glassy and drops slid down her cheeks. I hated her for her weakness, for having a heart to break. That he could hurt her, that anyone could hurt her like that, was inexcusable.

I’m only crying from the pain, I told myself. From the pain in my wrist. Not from anything else.

This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Shawn Westover
Page Number: 110-111
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

Shawn fingered the thick steel, which I was sure he could tell was not cheap at all. I stood silently, paralyzed by dread but also by pity. In that moment I hated him, and I wanted to scream it in his face. I imagined the way he would crumple, crushed under the weight of my words and his own self-loathing. Even then I understood the truth of it: that Shawn hated himself far more than I ever could.

“You’re using the wrong screws,” he said. “You need long ones for the wall and grabbers for the door. Otherwise, it’ll bust right off.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Shawn Westover (speaker)
Page Number: 121
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

Reflecting on it now, I’m not sure the injury changed him that much, but I convinced myself that it had, and that any cruelty on his part was entirely new. I can read my journals from this period and trace the evolution—of a young girl rewriting her history. In the reality she constructed for herself nothing had been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet. I wish I had my best friend back, she wrote. Before his injury, I never got hurt at all.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Shawn Westover
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

I’d always known that my father believed in a different God. As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. They believed in modesty; we practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal; we left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the Second Coming; we were actually prepared. For as long as I could remember, I’d known that the members of my own family were the only true Mormons I had ever known, and yet for some reason, here at this university, in this chapel, for the first time I felt the immensity of the gap. I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 28 Quotes

“Everyone has undergone a change,” [Dr. Kerry] said. “The other students were relaxed until we came to this height. Now they are uncomfortable, on edge. You seem to have made the opposite journey. This is the first time I’ve seen you at home in yourself. It’s in the way you move: it’s as if you’ve been on this roof all your life.”

[…]

I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Dr. Kerry (speaker)
Page Number: 237
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 34 Quotes

The knife was small, only five or six inches long and very thin. The blade glowed crimson. I rubbed my thumb and index finger together, then brought them to my nose and inhaled. Metallic. It was definitely blood. Not mine—he’d merely handed me the knife—but whose?

“If you’re smart, Siddle Lister,” Shawn said, “you’ll use this on yourself. Because it will be better than what I’ll do to you if you don’t.”

[…] I half-wondered if I should return to the bathroom and climb through the mirror, then send out the other girl, the one who was sixteen. She could handle this, I thought. She would not be afraid, like I was. She would not be hurt, like I was. She was a thing of stone, with no fleshy tenderness. I did not yet understand that it was this fact of being tender—of having lived some years of a life that allowed tenderness—that would, finally, save me.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Shawn Westover (speaker)
Page Number: 286-287
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35 Quotes

My parents said he was justified in cutting me off. Dad said I was hysterical, that I’d thrown thoughtless accusations when it was obvious my memory couldn’t be trusted. Mother said my rage was a real threat and that Shawn had a right to protect his family. […]

Reality became fluid. The ground gave way beneath my feet, dragging me downward, spinning fast, like sand rushing through a hole in the bottom of the universe. The next time we spoke, Mother told me that the knife had never been meant as a threat. “Shawn was trying to make you more comfortable,” she said. “He knew you’d be scared if he were holding a knife, so he gave it to you.” A week later she said there had never been any knife at all.

“Talking to you,” she said, “your reality is so warped. It’s like talking to someone who wasn’t even there.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Faye Westover / Mother (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad, Shawn Westover
Page Number: 291-292
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 36 Quotes

While they plotted how to reconvert me, I plotted how to let them. I was ready to yield, even if it meant an exorcism. A miracle would be useful: if I could stage a convincing rebirth, I could dissociate from everything I’d said and done in the last year. I could take it all back—blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad, Faye Westover / Mother
Page Number: 300
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 40 Quotes

Until that moment [the girl in the mirror] had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed—how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance—I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house.

That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.

I call it an education.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker)
Page Number: 328-329
Explanation and Analysis: