Educated

The Mountain That Raised Her

Tara Westover's strongest childhood memory is not actually a memory. It's a scene she imagined so vividly, and so many times, that her mind eventually filed it as something that had happened. Federal agents surrounding her family's house. Her mother shot at a kitchen window holding a baby. The agents did not come for the Westovers. The scene never happened. But it lived inside Tara as truth because her father lived inside it as truth, and her father's mind shaped the weather of her childhood the way Buck's Peak shaped the weather above the family junkyard.

That admission, on page one of Educated, sets the rules for everything that follows. The memoir is written by someone who has trained herself to doubt her own memory. Tara holds a Cambridge PhD in history; she knows that an unreliable narrator who knows she is unreliable is more trustworthy than one who claims perfect recall. She doesn't ask you to take her at her word. She asks you to watch her work out what is true, in the same way she had to work it out — slowly, painfully, with footnotes correcting siblings who remember the same events differently.

The mountain itself is the first character in the book. Buck's Peak rises above a corner of rural Idaho the Westovers consider sovereign territory. The face of the mountain holds the shape of what the family calls the Indian Princess: ravines for legs, a spray of dark pines for hair, watching south for the buffalo to return. Spring is when the Princess thaws. Winter is when she disappears. The seasons rotate, the snows that fall in winter always melt in the spring, and the same sun comes up every morning, and that is how Tara is taught time works — cyclical, eternal, never fundamentally going anywhere. Linear progress is something other people believe in, the way other people believe in vaccines.