Educated (37 page)

When I was a child, I waited for my mind to grow, for my experiences to accumulate and my choices to solidify, taking shape into the likeness of a person. That person, or that likeness of one, had belonged. I was
of
that mountain, the mountain that had made me. It was only as I grew older that I wondered if how I had started is how I would end—if the first shape a person takes is their only true shape.

As I write the final words of this story, I’ve not seen my parents in years, since my grandmother’s funeral. I’m close to Tyler, Richard and Tony, and from them, as well as from other family, I hear of the ongoing drama on the mountain—the injuries, violence and shifting loyalties. But it comes to me now as distant hearsay, which is a gift. I don’t know if the separation is permanent, if one day I will find a way back, but it has brought me peace.

That peace did not come easily. I spent two years enumerating my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath.

But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about
them
. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.

I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.

It was the only way I could love him.

When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that life, I perceived him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. When he was before me, towering, indignant, I could not remember how, when I was young, his laugh used to shake his gut and make his glasses shine. In his stern presence, I could never recall the pleasant way his lips used to twitch, before they were burned away, when a memory tugged tears from his eyes. I can only remember those things now, with a span of miles and years between us.

But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.

If there was a single moment when the breach between us, which had been cracking and splintering for two decades, was at last too vast to be bridged, I believe it was that winter night, when I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, while, without my knowing it, my father grasped the phone in his knotted hands and dialed my brother. Diego, the knife. What followed was very dramatic. But the real drama had already played out in the bathroom.

It had played out when, for reasons I don’t understand, I was unable to climb through the mirror and send out my sixteen-year-old self in my place.

Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed—how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance—I was still
her.
At best I was two people, a fractured mind.
She
was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house.

That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.

I call it an education.

For Tyler

To my brothers Tyler, Richard and Tony I owe the greatest debt for making this book possible, first in the living of it, then in the writing of it. From them and their wives, Stefanie, Kami and Michele, I learned much of what I know about family.

Tyler and Richard in particular were generous with their time and their memories, reading multiple drafts, adding their own details, and in general helping me make the book as accurate as possible. Though our perspectives may have differed in some particulars, their willingness to verify the facts of this story enabled me to write it.

Professor David Runciman encouraged me to write this memoir and was among the first to read the manuscript. Without his confidence in it, I might never have had confidence in it myself.

I am grateful to those who make books their life’s work and who gave a portion of that life to this book: my agents, Anna Stein and Karolina Sutton; and my wonderful editors, Hilary Redmon and Andy Ward at Random House, and Jocasta Hamilton at Hutchinson; as well as the many other people who worked to edit, typeset and launch this story. Most notably, Boaty Boatwright at ICM was a tireless champion. Special thanks are owed to Ben Phelan, who was given the difficult task of fact-checking this book, and who did so rigorously but with great sensitivity and professionalism.

I am especially grateful to those who believed in this book before it was a book, when it was just a jumble of home-printed papers. Among those early readers are Dr. Marion Kant, Dr. Paul Kerry, Annie Wilding, Livia Gainham, Sonya Teich, Dunni Alao and Suraya Sidhi Singh.

My aunts Debbie and Angie came back into my life at a crucial moment, and their support means everything. For believing in me, always, thanks to Professor Jonathan Steinberg. For granting me haven, emotional as well as practical, in which to write this book, I am indebted to my dear friend, Drew Mecham.

Certain footnotes have been included to give a voice to memories that differ from mine. The notes concerning two stories—Luke’s burn and Shawn’s fall from the pallet—are significant and require additional commentary.

In both events, the discrepancies between accounts are many and varied. Take Luke’s burn. Everyone who was there that day either saw someone who wasn’t there, or failed to see someone who was. Dad saw Luke, and Luke saw Dad. Luke saw me, but I did not see Dad and Dad did not see me. I saw Richard and Richard saw me, but Richard did not see Dad, and neither Dad nor Luke saw Richard. What is one to make of such a carousel of contradiction? After all the turning around and round, when the music finally stops, the only person everyone can agree was actually present that day is Luke.

Shawn’s fall from the pallet is even more bewildering. I was not there. I heard my account from others, but was confident it was true because I’d heard it told that way for years, by many people, and because Tyler had heard the same story. He remembered it the way I did, fifteen years later. So I put it in writing. Then this other story appeared.
There was no waiting,
it insists.
The chopper was called right away.

I’d be lying if I said these details are unimportant, that the “big picture” is the same no matter which version you believe. These details matter. Either my father sent Luke down the mountain alone, or he did not; either he left Shawn in the sun with a serious head injury, or he did not. A different father, a different man, is born from those details.

I don’t know which account of Shawn’s fall to believe. More remarkably, I don’t know which account of Luke’s burn to believe, and
I was there.
I can return to that moment. Luke is on the grass. I look around me. There is no one else, no shadow of my father, not even the idea of him pushing in on the periphery of my memory. He is not there. But in Luke’s memory he
is
there, laying him gently in the bathtub, administering a homeopathic for shock.

What I take from this is a correction, not to my memory but to my understanding. We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell. This is especially true in families. When one of my brothers first read my account of Shawn’s fall, he wrote to me: “I can’t imagine Dad calling 911. Shawn would have died first.” But maybe not. Maybe, after hearing his son’s skull crack, the desolate thud of bone and brain on concrete, our father was not the man we thought he would be, and assumed he had been for years after. I have always known that my father loves his children and powerfully; I have always believed that his hatred of doctors was more powerful. But maybe not. Maybe, in that moment, a moment of real crisis, his love subdued his fear and hatred both.

Maybe the real tragedy is that he could live in our minds this way, in my brother’s and mine, because his response in other moments—thousands of smaller dramas and lesser crises—had led us to see him in that role. To believe that should
we
fall, he would not intervene. We would die first.

We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories. Nothing has revealed that truth to me more than writing this memoir—trying to pin down the people I love on paper, to capture the whole meaning of them in a few words, which is of course impossible. This is the best I can do: to tell that
other
story next to the one I remember. Of a summer day, a fire, the smell of charred flesh, and a father helping his son down the mountain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TARA WESTOVER was born in Idaho in 1986. She received her BA from Brigham Young University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014.
Educated
is her first book.

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