Educated by Tara Westover review – escape from a Mormon fundamentalist family

We hear a lot about the edges of the US these days. Geographically, these places might be in the middle of the continent, but they are on the periphery of the country’s economic life, and often the social one too. The people who live there are desperate and pitiable, we are told, just as much as they are brutal and superstitious.

Tara Westover’s memoir is about being from just such a place and people. She was born to Mormon fundamentalist parents in Idaho, the youngest of seven. Her father Gene was the prophet of their small family, convinced the world was going to end at the stroke of the millennium. (When it did not, the author observes, the “disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this”.) He does not believe in sending his children to school, but does believe that dairy products are sinful, owing to a message from God. “Isaiah doesn’t say which is evil, butter or honey,” is how he delivers the good news. “But if you ask, the Lord will tell you!”

Faye, Westover’s mother, largely defers to her husband, in spite of what evidently were some doubts about the divinity of his testimony. She finds some independence in her roles as a kind of faith healer and as an experienced but apparently unlicensed midwife. Eventually, she takes up essential oils, something called muscle testing, and “energy work”. That all these activities appear somewhat contrary to Mormon religious doctrine is something Westover never explicitly addresses. In the same manner that her child self once did, she seems to accept her mother’s explanations. Muscle testing, for example, is an “act of faith in which God spoke through her fingers”.

In this account – Westover’s family dispute her version of events – life is grim in all the ways one might expect. Money is a constant struggle; Gene works largely in scrap metal but it isn’t enough. Cars driven by exhausted family members crash during long drives, but hospitals and western medicine are forbidden so injuries persist and fester. An amazing number of freak accidents befall the male Westovers: leg shreddings, burnings. The author herself is repeatedly beaten and abused by an elder brother who charges into her room while she’s sleeping and fastens his hands around her throat, calling her a whore because of her friendship with a local boy.

And she gradually makes her way out of all of it. She has no formal education but manages to study her way to college. She struggles initially but gets good enough marks to do a PhD at Cambridge. And in the course of all that, Westover writes, she found herself – through what some might call a “transformation” and others a “betrayal”. As she puts it in the last line of the book: “I call it an education.”

If this were the 1990s, a snarky columnist might have already slapped a genre label on this book from the summary alone, deriding it as an example of “misery lit”. These chronicles of tough beginnings were enormously popular; Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors topped bestseller charts. Critics are apt to castigate the sentimentalism that often thuds through these books – people in them are villains and heroes, the messiness of real life condensed into easier answers about who was right or wrong. And when James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces turned out to be largely bunk, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced. They knew it, they said. They knew these books were dishonest melodramas.

Westover’s narrative style – episodic, meditative and repetitive – doesn’t embrace melodrama to the extent that many of those books did. Her voice is slightly flimsy, scaffolding with sheets of plastic floating off, as if still in the process of building itself. Other than as a sort of articulate vortex of suffering, one hasn’t much of a sense of her. Educated relies on the conceit that Westover was saved by books, but at the end I had a sense of our narrator still hiding behind her degrees and certificates, not quite ready to step into the light. I kept thinking of Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, a memoir of her hardscrabble Texas upbringing, and how Karr’s voice was one you couldn’t ignore.

Like Karr, Westover has a story to tell that shouldn’t be ignored. Her background says something important about the US: that even in a place of great opportunity, you can grow up without any idea of how to touch its white-hot centre. This memoir tracks all the ways that traditional American life puts up roadblocks and actively dissuades you from outgrowing your “roots”. There are insights here that could compete with JD Vance’s problematic and more ideological Hillbilly Elegy – if only they were more directly articulated.

Educated is published by Hutchinson. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Tara Westover gained a PhD from Cambridge University