What I'm Reading (Educated: A Memoir)

I've already blogged about the Impeachment papers and A Rumor of War--both excellent. 

Others in the pile above I haven't finished yet, or weren't worth finishing:
Euphoria: literary schlock;  
Opium Fiend: my addiction's cooler than yours, and it has the best paraphernalia (true, but boring);  
Project Rebirth: almost worth reading for its treasure trove of misapplied metaphors and tropes, such as, "They rolled up their sleeves and got to work cleaning up the site of the fallen towers". 
(I hope they had protective gear on top of those sleeves.)

Worth reading:
Educated: A Memoir (2018), by Tara Westover

This book gave me bad dreams--it's that good. 
Not just another memoir of a traumatic childhood that leaves you feeling like a voyeur, though Westover's childhood does have the fascination of a car wreck (and includes actual car wrecks caused by her father's mania).

Westover was a young girl in rural Idaho when the Feds attacked the gun-stashing Weaver family at Ruby Ridge. That event formed the backdrop of her daily life with fundamentalist parents who were always preparing for the End Days and/or a siege by the Feds, and with a scary, violent older brother.

But, scarier, Westover paints, one brushstroke at a time, a picture of how she was educated into social beliefs that she accepted as so normal, she didn't know she had them––and how hard it was to peel those away, and how costly--like peeling layers of s/kin.

 It reminds me of a winter when, as usual, I covered my indoor windows indoors with super-thin plastic sheeting, made for that purpose. If you live in the northland, you know the sheets come pressed together, in folded layers––sometimes hard to separate.

After I'd finished one window, I realized I'd put up two sheets, that were so seamlessly stuck together I hadn't realized they were two, and so I hadn't even tried to separate them.

If you know your reality is layered with delusions, you might try to peel them off--but of course the thing about successful delusions is you don't even know you have them.
And when your parents give them to you, they are pressure sealed with love.

Westover tells us early on about the dominant memory of her childhood: seeing her mother shot to death in her kitchen, and running to take the baby from her mother's arms.

But this didn't happen to her––it happened to the Weavers of Ruby Ridge––her father told his children that the Feds murdered the Weaver family. It was his defining story about The Government, and the one that, looking back, she realized most shaped his entire philosophy. 

He never told her––perhaps never knew himself, living without news sources––that the US general public had been horrified at how the Feds handled the surveillance that turned into a siege, 
and that the US Senate held hearings and issued a report calling for reforms in federal law enforcement to prevent a repeat of the losses of life at Ruby Ridge:

INTRO to "FBI Crisis Management Reforms Subsequent to the Events at Ruby Ridge"

The FBI has learned the lessons of Ruby Ridge. As the Subcommittee has already heard, we have changed policies and procedures to prevent similar, tragic mistakes in the future. I have prepared a handout describing these reforms. I request that it be made part of the record."

(Bad things (and more bad things) had already been set in motion though.)

Leaving Your Parents

I was talking to J about Educated, and she said, "You and I never had to reject our parents' philosophy."

Yes, I agree, we didn't––not exactly––because our parents' philosophy held that questioning  and doubting and even rejecting what they taught us was a Good. 
It's pretty hard to step out of that. 

But my challenge was still the same as Westover's in one respect:
the challenge to realize that our parents' truths were philosophies, were adopted positions––not necessarily consciously adopted, but not inevitable, natural truths either.

Looking back, I cringe at some of the things my parents did consciously choose to adopt. For instance, we kids were taught (not that I remember being instructed) to call our mother Ma-MAWH, pronounced and spelled in French:
"Maman".
We were growing up in Wisconsin...
My parents must have sat down and discussed that choice.

I did have to peel away some of my parents best-loved ideals--that French things were Superior. (My sister went on to get an MA in French.)

Looking Back, Later

Westover was born in 1985, and this book ends with some fairly recent events--she only finished her PhD three years ago.
This is not really a criticism, but I wondered how she'll tell this story in 20 years.

I think of Karen Armstrong who wrote a scathing memoir of life in a convent soon after she left, while she was still in emotional turmoil, and then years later, Armstrong took a different approach in her second memoir (which I love), The Spiral Staircase. 

Where Armstrong thought she'd been too harsh in her first telling, Westover is actually pretty restrained in her telling of her family--you can feel the pull of loyalty tugging on her words.  
She insists, for instance, that she has always known that her father loved his children. (So much so that I wondered, what does she think love is? Is this another pressure-sealed belief?)

Her memoir also reminded me of Roxanne Gay's Hunger––after I read it, while she goes into some gruesome detail, Gay still seemed very shielded to me, and Westover too remains a bit fuzzy. 
Fair enough--you don't have to peel off all your skin for readers.