Zack Vayda and "Educated"

Yesterday I finished Educated by Tara Westover. The book is an autobiography, outlining her childhood growing up in an extremist Mormon family with a bipolar father and abusive older brother. She describes the suffocation of her childhood, the difficult, eventual revelation of the real world, how she built an impressive life in spite (and also because) of her upbringing, and how her family eventually exiled her.

Tara Westover

There is so much in this book that I absolutely love. I have a few bullet points I need to write about, but the underlying theme for why everything in this book is powerful is because of the way she writes. She has some of the most powerful imagery, emotion translation, and dialogue, and all of it without a single sentence that was too wordy. I attribute this to her unique perspective from her childhood. She was never formally educated, and while that means she had significant difficulty catching up in college, this also allowed her to maintain a flavor, a perspective unlike anyone else. Therefore, while nothing in her book is truly new, because her writing is unlike anything I’ve read before, it all feels new.

 Buck’s Peak

The first thing that caught my eye was her relationship to the setting of her childhood on Buck’s Peak in the foothills of Idaho. The way she talked about the peak, how it changed in the seasons, and how every season was a completely new experience, reminded me very much about how I feel about Maine. The imagery she used to describe the banks of snow, the smell and feel of the pines, the fields of glowing stalks of grass, and the faded colors of summer all hit directly home for me. It made me miss living in a place centered around nature. For her, though, it painted a beautiful juxtaposition between the eternality of the mountain and the nature around it and her slow progression of realization of her toxic family life.

Childhood Mentality

While her upbringing was far more severe and harmful than mine, I still found some similarities with the tight, unyielding environment that is conservative religion. What I like is how she managed to lead me to important realizations about the environment that I’ve always struggled to put into words, without ever actually writing the specific words out. For example, she talked a lot about how her father was an eccentric extremist, believing the government was the embodiment of the devil himself. This means the only baseline for logic and perspective is the head of the house. When the baseline of logic is given to a specific person that can’t be challenged, it means that person can never be wrong. They have complete control and no other power can challenge their point of view. At this level, no matter how genuine to begin with, it’s no stretch of the imagination to see how selfish opinion and arrogance will leak in and overpower the logic without the person ever knowing. This is specifically my issue with religion as a whole. If there is a god and that god can only materialize and speak through leaders, then those leaders become god. As the head of the household, her father could instill whatever thoughts he wanted to into his children’s heads. This is how she grew up believing the government was Satan incarnate, how modern medicine was a trap built to poison and control the populace (sound familiar, Antivaxxers?), how one man was worth several women, how a woman’s place is under the man, and so on and so forth. Because of her, I’ve been able to put this into words. Because of her, I now wonder if humans are ultimately drawn to good, or if humans are drawn to whatever draws them the most intensely. This will have to be a question for another time.

Positive Liberty

Somehow, despite her disempowering environment, truth was able to draw her out of it, just enough to get her to decide to go to college. With her incredible work ethic, she studied for the ACT and scored a 28 at the age of 16. She forced her way through an impossibly new and hard world her first year and then began to grow. With her learnings in undergrad, then her graduate at Cambridge, and finally her doctorate at Harvard, she was slowly and painfully able to work her way out and see her family for what they were. She called this the education process, which is a synonym for the deconstruction process, what I’ve been calling it. It’s exciting to live through someone else’s experience with deconstruction, to see this work towards enlightenment is essential for anyone looking to achieve a higher way of life. In one of her classes at Cambridge, they discussed the term “positive liberty,” which means self-mastery, or to be liberated from all forms of self-coercion. I love this term, because it draws attention to how getting past forms of external coercion is a completely different thing than self-coercion. For me, and for most, I would imagine, breaking self-coercion is the final obstacle before true enlightenment, the last frontier to master to achieve the fullness of one’s self. From what I’ve seen, most people live their entire lives without completing this last, final step, and many don’t even begin the process. Deconstruction hasn’t brought me perfect happiness, of course, but I can’t imagine living life so close-minded and blinded to myself.

Writing Style

Clearly, Tara’s education led her to a life and career in learning and writing. The way she discussed her papers, assignments, dissertations, and over-all education made me miss having those things in my life. I can write, and I’m always grateful for that, but the thought of having a life built around learning and translating that information into something else via my own writing sounds paradisaical. Unfortunately, or fortunately, many careers and ways of life fit this description. My current goal of becoming a professor still falls well within these parameters. My job would be to take a topic, teach it to those looking to learn, and continue my own research and education on the side. Even now, just writing that makes my throat close up as I try to hold off my emotions. The negative to this is it feels so very far away. I want that life now. I want to be fully immersed in this world as soon as humanly possible. I know that’s not how this works, and I plan on earning my way into this life, but if I could snap my fingers and have it now, I’d be hard pressed not to.

All these thoughts, all this learning, comes to me specifically because of how Tara writes and the one-of-a-kind relationship she has to language. I hope, someday, I might be able to discover what my unique relationship is to writing, what I can offer the world through my words that’s different from anyone else’s.