When thinking of America from almost anywhere else in the world, the words ‘American Dream’, Donald Trump, New York and Los Angeles come to mind; it is ‘the land of the free’ and a place immigrants flock to for its limitless opportunities. So when one encounters Tara Westover’s account of life in rural Idaho, impoverished and growing up in a family that survived off of a scrap metal junkyard, unlicensed midwifery practice and a herbal medicine business, that image of a glossy and prosperous America, comes crashing down.

The writer of the memoir is the youngest of seven who was raised in a household where the only books she’d ever been allowed to read were the Bible, The Book of Mormon and speeches by Brigham Young and Joseph Smith. Without any formal schooling until she miraculously gains a seat at Brigham Young University at the age of 17, she grows up unaware of the Holocaust: a word she belatedly learns when she encounters it in an art history lecture at University and innocently announces, "I don’t know this word". The announcement is met with "an almost violent silence." She thinks Europe is a country and has no clue about world history or racism, about Martin Luther King or Napoleon, feminism or the civil rights movement.

The story of the Westovers is not for the faint-hearted. It’s one that is often violent and horrific, about a family led by a Mormon survivalist patriarch Gene (a pseudonym, which the writer employs for all the characters) who is suspicious of the Federal government, the medical establishment, and formal schooling: the perfect storm for abuse, oppression and manipulation in a family of seven children. Only three of the eldest briefly attend public school, whereas the four youngest do not even get birth certificates out of Gene’s fear of state surveillance and the Illuminati. The mother Faye is complicit in Gene’s madness. Though herself educated and hailing from a more genteel family in the nearest town, she never comes in the way of Gene’s preachings and choices to isolate the family.

The family lives in appalling conditions. Most of the time is spent working on the junkyard sorting scrap metal in extremely poor safety conditions. Gene often tosses large pieces of metal in the direction of his children or demands that they operate dangerous machinery and perform manoeuvres that invite injury and trauma. Head injuries, near-fatal car crashes, severe body burns and deep gashes are commonplace in Westover’s home life, but the only medical treatment permissible under Gene’s doctrine is Faye’s questionable herbal remedies from "God’s pharmacy" and prayer. "God and his angels are here, working right alongside us," he reassures the author, "They won’t let you get hurt."

Mental illness is the elephant in the room for most of the narrative, and we see the power it holds when left untreated and placed in a position of power in the case of Gene, Faye and their son Shawn, Westover’s older brother and abuser. Gene exhibits signs of what Westover interprets as bipolar disorder, a revelation she has during a psychology course in college where the professor lists the symptoms of the disorder: mania, paranoia, depression, euphoria, delusions of grandeur and persecution complexes. Though Gene never receives a formal diagnosis, his unpredictable moods and paranoid version of reality skew the entire family’s worldview.

Faye starts off as a reasonable woman trying to get by in her difficult circumstances, but after a horrific car crash she sustains a brain injury, her personality drastically changes. After retreating away from family life and into the damp and dark family basement to recover from headaches after the crash, she develops faith in a bizarre practice she dubs ‘muscle testing’; clicking her fingers together obsessively to make decisions including which herbal remedy would best treat her son’s severe burns after a particularly careless decision made by Gene at the scrap yard.

Shawn, Westover’s older brother, also encounters several traumatic head injuries, some of which prove nearly life-threatening. His presumed brain damage results in a violent and abusive personality, with Tara bearing the brunt of it. As she grows into a young woman, Shawn’s physical and verbal abuse reaches a crescendo, choking her in her sleep, calling her terrible names like ‘whore’ in an attempt to control her forays into mixed company and the outside world where she has joined a theatre troupe, dragging her by her hair and brutal arm twisting outside the town grocery store when possessed by fits of rage and jealousy.

There is no one to protect her from his behaviour and she blames herself for deserving this kind of treatment. "Suddenly that worth felt conditional like it could be taken or squandered," she writes. "It was not inherent; it was bestowed. What was of worth was not me, but the veneer of constraints and observances that obscured me." By the end of the book when she finds the courage to confront her family about Shawn, she is excommunicated and cut off by her parents and siblings.

The first step toward’s her liberation, then, is her decision to take the ACT for admission into BYU, a decision that is supported by an older brother, Tyler, who also managed to flee the family and make a new life for himself with the help of education. Westover has a voracious appetite for learning, and her talent lands her fellowships at Cambridge University and Harvard, ultimately completing a PhD in history from the former.

For Westover, being ‘educated’ is an act of rebellion where she learns how to think for herself, one that requires a lot of courage given her unusual upbringing. As she pursues her education further, her family recedes in the backdrop, their influence weakened now that Westover has gained independence. She grapples with "how to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to create my own mind," and asks herself, "is it possible to reconcile her old and new selves?" Ultimately, education is a double-edged sword that brings both freedom and pain. It also gives Westover the tools to make her own choices and tell her extraordinary story, a luxury she was denied for most of her life under her family’s influence.

Educated
Author: Tara Westover
Publisher: Windmill UK
Pages: 400
Price: Rs1,095