Freeman, Hadley. "Tara Westover on Turning Her Off-the-Grid Life Into a Remarkable Memoir". Vogue . Retrieved July 25, 2020. Observing people around me, it seemed that university degrees actually helped very few people in our community. Most individuals that I knew of returned to work on their family’s farm after getting a degree. Those that did not return, I really didn’t know about. Without being able to perceive a direct benefit from a university degree, I did not initially consider higher education very seriously. Our father was actually the person who first gave me a specific purpose to get a university degree. He told me that if I got an

Tyler Westover: Westover's older brother, the third brother of the seven siblings. Tyler is the first to go to college, and he encourages Westover to take the ACT so she can apply and go, too. He supports her against their parents and brother Shawn. He is 8 years older than Tara.Really interesting review, thank you! I found Educated very interesting, understanding that with all memoirs, lots of it is left to the authors memories. I’m curious to read Educating now too! I want to say one small thing about midwifery. Home birth midwives with no training is very different than certified home birth midwives, who go through years of schooling and training. They are medical professionals who are qualified to deliver babies at home for women with low-risk pregnancies. They are trained to determine if there are any risks with the pregnancy that would require a hospital delivery. There are also certified nurse midwives who work in hospitals, this is incredibly common. So “midwifery” as a general term doesn’t distinguish between the differences between the various types of midwives. I am a labor and delivery nurse in a hospital, and unfortunately many of the complications we see in labor and delivery are caused by the hospital protocols and practices. I could go into lots of detail on this but I think it’s too long for a comment. Of course there are many legitimate complications that occur! But I firmly believe after years of working in delivery rooms in top hospitals that low-risk pregnancies are safer delivering at home. Just thought I’d add another perspective to that point. Thank you again for this thorough and thoughtful review. Using the word “crazy” is so hard to hear because it’s insulting to everyone with this illness even though it manifests in different ways. Many people with diagnosed schizophrenia that take medication early on and consistently never experience another psychotic episode again. Unfortunately, since Val was unmedicated, his actions to his family are abusive. Whether claims of him almost crushing her in the junk yard are true or not, his paranoia of the government and medical establishments created an unsafe environment for his family. In terms of whether or not Tara’s account is “true,” as others have pointed out, it’s her truth. Every last little detail is not important, the overall conditions under which she was brought up is the point here, not minor details about places and the exact timeline of events. In fact, as others have pointed out, she has gone above and beyond in an attempt to make it as accurate as possible. Probably because she knew her father would retaliate in someway, which he has in the publishing of this book. The writing and publishing of Educating was CLEARLY not her mother’s idea, nor her sole creation. He uses all of his family as his personal slaves, for his own purposes, and it’s clear that is what this book is. I have NO interest in reading it. Thank you for doing that for me. Westover encounters Shawn with a bloody knife on another visit home. Terrified, she lies that Gene lied about Shawn's treatment to Audrey. Later, she realizes that Faye had never been on her or Audrey's side. After returning to England, Shawn threatens her life. Audrey also cuts ties with Westover, claiming she is under Satan's control. Westover then begins graduate school at Harvard and her parents briefly visit and try to convince her to come home. It is crystal clear to me that Val is the driving force behind the book Educating, and that he is controlling and manipulating LaRee, as Tara pointed out he did countless times in Educated. I truly wonder if she wrote any of it.

Also having just read Educated and ended up here by curiosity, I am left totally overwhelmed by the book and the life story that it tells. Frank tries to get her to talk more about this but she insists they need to return to studying. While discussing Chekov, Rita decides they must go to the theater, and convinces Frank to accompany her even though he is wary of what he deems “amateur” performances. Rita, a working-class woman in her twenties from Liverpool, arrives at the office of Frank, a late middle-aged professor at a university. She is there to be tutored after having decided to return to school. Frank is on the phone with Julia, his younger, live-in girlfriend, saying he will be going by the pub after work but promises to be home later. He is mostly good-humored but rather weary and prone to mild bitterness and sarcasm. I and my housemate/best friend are reading “Educated” aloud, one chapter per night, right now. We are about halfway through the book. We’re just taking it in, without judgement, and with a tiny grain of salt because we both know (we are in our 60’s) that memories are … shaded? … colorized? … at best. And we’re OK with that. It appears that LaRee is also on the crazy train too, but not to the extent that Val is, but I wonder what she was like as a 20 year old girl, and why she wanted to choose the life she choose? It is a shame that mentally ill people have children together, and 7 at that. I hope that Tara and her siblings can have peace in their lives and truly learn to deal with their childhoods in a manner that does not effect them forever.Dr. Jonathan Steinberg: Westover's advisor at Cambridge. He finds her talented and takes an interest in her education. I enjoyed reading this article. I grew up Christian from Minnesota and went to school with many people that identified themselves as “Mormon” rather than the Church of Jesus Christ. It could be a location thing. This was the one thing I noticed that you couldn’t be impartial on, understandably so. I find Tara’s character was very honest , powerful , courageous knowing the fact that her father , brother or any other family member are quite capable to harm her both emotionally & physically after her book had published. It is not easy for anyone to step forward and talk about her sufferings so openly. especially Tara who loves her family & tried many times to be accepted by them. Moreover in her book and for that matter in all the interviews I have watched , she has always said that her family loves her but their beliefs are way too different & she has given her perspective without disgracing anyone. That said, my hat is off to you for doing a great job, and I also thank you for the photos. They will enhance our nightly reading (I am the reader, as a former radio announcer and current audio-book narrator, and she is the one that sits all cuddled up in blankets, coloring on her iPad while I read – yes, it’s adorable).

No one, based on reading these two books, will be able to discern the absolute truth about what really happened to Tara growing up. It’s a he-said, she-said finger-pointing blame game. And it’s sad. As Tara describes, our father is very suspicious of the government. At one point, he told us, his children, that he was concerned someone from the government could come to our home and gun shots could be fired. Nothing he ever said, however, led me to believe that this concern was connected with our homeschool. Instead, he referenced Charlton Hesston’s sentiment that the only way the government would get his guns would be from his “cold dead hands.” To expand a little further, our father also said that he did not think that the government would send local law enforcement or even federal agents to take guns away from law-abiding U.S. citizens. He considered it more likely that such a task would have to be fulfilled by troops from the United Nations. It should also be noted that the guns in question did not include high capacity, semi-automatic rifles, such as have been used in mass shootings or are designed for intense combat. I have never seen our father with such a weapon, and as far as I know, he has never owned one. One of my favorite courses that I took in college was dedicated to the study of memoirs. I find it truly fascinating that one person's account of an event can be completely different from another person's perspective of the same event. We studied Holocaust literature that recounted a prison camp revolt where the prisoners stated that there were three explosions in an attempt to blow up a crematorium. However, historians who have studied this attempt to overthrow the prison stated that only one explosion took place. Why do I recount this to you now? Because it BEGS the question: if someone's reality and perception of an event differs from historical accuracy, does it make it any less true or real to the reality of the person who experienced said incident? Do we discount what was perceived and experienced in the mind's eye of the witnesses or always side with cold, hard facts? Perhaps in the trauma of overturning their Nazi guards, prisoners in the frenzy of everything did traumatically experience three explosions or echoes of the first explosion. That is their reality. That is their truth/memoir. Sorry, I tend to geek out on this subject. But, because this is LaRee Westover's truth/memoir, do we hold it up against Tara's and only find fault? In reading this book, did I, as a reader, find her truth to be less believable than her daughters? Yes. But I don't discount that LaRee's perception of events recounted in both of these books is any less "true" than Tara's recounting of occurrences.

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I hope the family reconcile as its one life & all good and bad needs to be sorted here in this life. I have become a big fan of Tara, her composed talks in public , her maturity is very high level for her age. I heard her singing & her voice is very melodious & therapeutic. I feel very bad that Val and LaRee have cast an unfavorable view on the Church of Jesus Christ, and hope readers of this book realize that fanatics exist in every religion, and that Val and Laree are extremists and not representative of almost all members of the Church of Jesus Christ.