Has anyone read LaRee Westover's memoir Educating?

[Kidlit]

This is Tara Westover's mom, and she says she was pushed to finish her memoir to "set the record straight" on some things Tara wrote. 
 Anybody read it and willing to share thoughts?

https://www.amazon.com/Educating-LaRee-Westover/dp/1735486507

[knitgrl]

That is an interesting development.

[maize]

I don't know if I could bring myself to read it.

I do very much believe that there are two sides to every story, and Tara is only human--her version can't be 100% accurate (as she herself acknowledges). My biggest takeaway from her book though is that she grew up in a home with significant and largely unacknowledged mental illness. Her dad was clearly profoundly impacted, and her mom maybe largely in denial (and later herself severely impacted by traumatic brain injury). I see no way that Tara's mother would be in a position to offer anything approaching an accurate assessment of what life was like for her children.

I'm not unsympathetic to the family's plight. Mental illness is the thorniest, gnarliest beast to wrangle, and mental illness misunderstood or denied warps everyone's experience and understanding. 

Edited May 24, 2023 by maize

[SquirrellyMama]

I wanted to read it after I read Educated, but I didn't want to spend $26 on it. I couldn't find it through Inter-library Loan either.  I'd be interested in hearing her "story".

Kelly

[Lecka]

My instinct is just — if your daughter writes a book called Educated, why are you writing a book called Educating?  It seems unnecessarily provocative.  Maybe the content doesn’t reflect that, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  

[Grace Hopper]

All memoirs are biased. But LaRee’s book is something that I’d have a hard time processing as coming from any sense of rationale. I mean, I’d be reading it with my Holden Caulfield/unreliable narrator radar on high alert. 

[KeriJ]

One trivial question I have had...can anyone comment on the fact that Tara claimed her dad had his face melted off and was permanently disfigured, yet there are recent photos? I don't imagine him having plastic surgery.  Would it just be Tara's exaggerated perspective? Am I remembering wrong?

[Carol in Cal.]

I think that in general throwing shade on your family in writing is a low way to make money.  I don’t love either one of these books, conceptually.

[El...]

I would spend a few hours reading it. I read Educated, and it gave me a chance to recall the experiences of some childhood friends. I wouldn't go out and spend money on the mom's response, though. If the library gets it, I'll read it.

Just as an aside, it kills me when people refer to Educated as a book about homeschooling!  

[prairiewindmomma]

38 minutes ago, KeriJ said:

One trivial question I have had...can anyone comment on the fact that Tara claimed her dad had his face melted off and was permanently disfigured, yet there are recent photos? I don't imagine him having plastic surgery.  Would it just be Tara's exaggerated perspective? Am I remembering wrong?

She claimed both her dad and her brother were burned badly. In an interview with Deseret News sometime 2020ish on Educating, the brother showed the reporter scarring on his legs.

Burns from several years ago can fade and heal if there wasn’t webbing. Dd got a deep non-facial second degree burn that sloughed and looked terrible that was treated with silvadene and lavender oil (under doctor care) that has healed only with pigmentation changes, and even that has largely faded. 
 

Sloughing does in fact look like melting off to a layperson.

[Brittany1116]

My big takeaway from Educated is that memory is flawed and sometimes reactive. She stated SEVERAL times that she didn't know if X was real or imagined, or what family members were present when Y occured, or if she was mixing up instances and events because of trauma. So while biographical, I couldn't trust much of it. Overall story of family dysfunction, sure. Details and minutiae of her whole childhood are iffy. My own kids recall insignificant things in life happening in a way their father and I know for fact they did not happen, because they are colored by strong emotion in a relative time point. 

[PaxEtLux]

It looks like this book is self-published, which means it is unlikely to be acquired by a library.  I will say that I've never seen such mixed Amazon reviews for a book.  Don't know what to make of that.

[Kidlit]

Thanks for weighing in, everyone.  I did read Educated and was riveted by it. My overall opinion, though, is that it would've benefited from the passage of time. It definitely felt to me like confused memories. That's not to blame Tara--just to say that maybe she should've waited a bit to publish. I was really curious to see if anyone here has actually read the mom's book, but I guess not. 

[maize]

I went searching and found and interesting long-form review.

One thing I learned from the review is that Tara grew up in the same area that both of my maternal grandparents were from. I wouldn't be surprised if we are related.

https://mrsladywordsmith.com/educating-memoir-laree-tara-westover/

[maize]

Hmm, I went sleuthing...turns out the Westovers are 5th cousins or so to my family. Not super close...

Yes, I have mad family history skills. Took me about twenty minutes to identify her maternal and paternal grandparents (via obituaries primarily) and attach them to my family tree 🌳 

Now if only I could have so much luck with my Swedish line...

[Kidlit]

4 minutes ago, maize said:

Hmm, I went sleuthing...turns out the Westovers are 5th cousins or so to my family. Not super close...

Yes, I have mad family history skills. Took me about twenty minutes to identify her maternal and paternal grandparents (via obituaries primarily) and attach them to my family tree 🌳 

Now if only I could have so much luck with my Swedish line...

You're good!

[EKS]

Educated drove me crazy.  I have a hard time believing that she essentially walked into the ACT cold (as in no education at all) and got a 28+.  There was definitely something missing from her story.  I've gotten Educating and am currently reading it.

[Lecka]

Well, she also was handpicked to be a scholar in England (I don’t remember what kind) and I thought her book was very well-written.

 

I also didn’t think she was “not educated at all” from the book.  But she seemed like she was a deep thinker on her own and really thinking about things on her own, and a sensitive person.  

 

All of this to say — I found her ACT score believable for a largely self-taught person who has gone on to this level of accomplishment.  I think it’s consistent.  
 

But I liked the book and I liked her 😉. It makes a difference in how I think she comes across.  
 

 

[Lecka]

My grandmother won some big prizes (for her town, going to a spelling bee on a train…) even though she was missing a lot of school to do farm work.  
 

There was feeling in the town that she “couldn’t have” done it when she had missed so much school.

 

It’s not the same situation, but I think it’s similar.  

[maize]

I think the entire family are very high IQ. 

I also think Tara's book downplays how much access she had to educational materials, even if in a largely unschooling way. 

[katilac]

10 minutes ago, EKS said:

Educated drove me crazy.  I have a hard time believing that she essentially walked into the ACT cold (as in no education at all) and got a 28+.  There was definitely something missing from her story.  I've gotten Educating and am currently reading it.

It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember thinking it seemed like she was really exaggerating their lack of education and educational resources. They had a computer while Tara was still living at home, if I recall correctly.  All but one of the siblings have some form of higher education, and three of them have PhDs. 

Things like saying she had an ACT prep book she worked on diligently, but then walked into the test and really didn't know what to do, annoyed me. And I'm pretty sure she was really off on stating the BYU ACT range, like what was top 25%, and that seems like a hard error to make. 

22 minutes ago, Lecka said:

All of this to say — I found her ACT score believable for a largely self-taught person who has gone on to this level of accomplishment.  I think it’s consistent.  

I do believe it's a possible score for a largely self-taught person, but not for a largely self-taught person who had few books and other educational resources. 

The level of achievement across all of the siblings doesn't speak to a deprived educational environment to me. 

There were enough other things that were genuine, and I felt like she exaggerated when she didn't need to. 

[Lecka]

It’s hard to know, I think they could be smart kids who all overcame a lot.

I think it sounds like there were some materials available, but it doesn’t sound like there was a lot of help at all, in a lot of ways.

I remember thinking she was in a very close mentorship with her mom with her mom’s midwife business.  I think things like that are tons of parental investment in a child, but also a parent relying on a smart and conscientious child.  
 

I do agree it doesn’t sound like they were a “no books, no computer, no one was taught to read or do basic math” situation.  
 

I think I didn’t really think she claimed that I guess.  
 

It’s been a little while since I’ve read the book.  
 

It was a very foreign/exotic book to me, too.

 

I bet anyone who has some kind of closer knowledge/experience could pick out and notice things that would go over my head.  
 

So I am interested to see those comments, because it’s not how I remember reading the book, but I think I read it in a more trusting way and without seeing things that could have caused me to be more skeptical. I just didn’t pick up on those things, I took them at face value.  
 

It makes me interested in re-reading it some time, with some greater perspective.  At least now it’s probably not such a long waiting time on inter-library loan!!!!!!  

[maize]

From the perspective of a not-so-far-removed-culturally person, Tara's description of her isolation and cluelessness didn't ring true to me. Her family were prepper-type extremists, but they attended a mainline LDS church (not one of the break-away fundamentalist groups) and that is a very pro-education environment in general. There are bulletin boards at every LDS church that often feature information about educational opportunities, advertising for universities like BYU, etc. "Get all the education you can" has been a common exhortation from Latter-day Saint leadership for decades. Church seminary programs (religious education for high school age youth) host college fairs. Church youth programs encourage education and personal improvement.  She would almost certainly have been a part of her local congregation's youth programs. Both of her parents had at least some college in their backgrounds.

Cummunity-wise, she mentions playing the lead role in a local musical theater production--which her parents fully supported. The family were well-off by local standards, they owned significant land and were heavily involved in the local community. 

She paints a picture of a very backwoods, isolated sort of childhood and that just doesn't ring true. My grandparents both grew up dirt poor in the same area, coming from the same religious background, and both grew up to seek continued further education, have a home full of books, etc. I just don't think that either the local culture nor her personal opportunities were quite as she paints them.

I suspect her mentors and editors had a significant hand in the way her narrative got written. It was written to make her background sound extra exotic compared to the elite universities she ended up at. It was, in short, written to sell.

The most authentic parts to me were those that dealt with her father's unhealthy and irrational patterns of thought. And I do also believe her account of physical and verbal abuse by her brother. 

[easypeasy]

I had a very negative reaction to Educated and can imagine why the mother would want to offer "her side of the story" for sure. For me, the entire book (Educated) felt so... forced. I don't know how to explain it. Just like the author was trying really, really, really hard to show how hard her life was and then, just *wow* she succeeded at an elite education despite everyone-around-her's efforts to drag. her. down.

*shrug* I dunno. Reading it just felt like listening to someone dig a deeper hole of what started out as a "little white lie" on a college entrance essay or something.

[Kidlit]

It has been years since I read it, but I think I agree that her lack of access to educational materials was perhaps exaggerated. One doesn't just magically make that ACT score while deprived altogether of educational opportunity.  I do remember the part about community theater and thinking it odd based on how she painted her family that she would be supported in that opportunity.  I dunno.  I found the book riveting, as I said above, but in a trainwreck and not particularly healthy sort of way.  

[Jean in Newcastle]

I have a visceral reaction to people manipulating the “truth “ to make themselves and their side look better and their “enemies “ and their side look worse. The daughter did it first. And now the mother. 

[thatfirstsip]

12 hours ago, EKS said:

Educated drove me crazy.  I have a hard time believing that she essentially walked into the ACT cold (as in no education at all) and got a 28+.  There was definitely something missing from her story.  I've gotten Educating and am currently reading it.

That's perfectly believable to me. 

A bright (highly gifted +) kid with a basic 6th-grade education, or who has self-educated to that point (which many bright kids do - very little of their learning happens in school for the first exposure, with maybe the exception of formal math), can absolutely get a 28+ on the ACT. It's correlated with IQ.

 

[HomeAgain]

Dh and I stopped using our local library after "renovations" (i.e. they cut all the shelving units in half so you have to stoop to find anything now), but I'll see if maybe they can put this on hold for me.

My takeaway from the Tara's book was that of a lack of intention with her education.  There was no discernible plan, no direction for her to shoot for.  Whether she got an education or not was irrelevant to the chaos. 

Now that the two of them have written books, it would be probably better for them to do therapy rather than publishing houses.

[Idalou]

I read them. I think the entire family is a bunch of freaks. Liars, exaggerators, nutty, disgusting, dangerous employers, pathetic homeschoolers, seriously lacking parental skills.  Take your pick.

Edited May 25, 2023 by Idalou

[TravelingChris]

16 hours ago, maize said:

I think the entire family are very high IQ. 

I also think Tara's book downplays how much access she had to educational materials, even if in a largely unschooling way. 

I have known a number of basically unschooled kids that have done very well.  They were all smart and reading a lot and figuring things a lot.  

I went to schools but really learned most of what I learned outside of school.  Like grammar, which wasn't being taught at all.  I had a natural advantage since I read very fast and also hyperfocus.  But I was also learning a lot outside of school.  

[EKS]

5 hours ago, thatfirstsip said:

A bright (highly gifted +) kid with a basic 6th-grade education, or who has self-educated to that point (which many bright kids do - very little of their learning happens in school for the first exposure, with maybe the exception of formal math), can absolutely get a 28+ on the ACT. It's correlated with IQ.

All achievement tests are absolutely correlated with IQ, to the point where it is reasonable to use them as a proxy for IQ.  But I suspect that it isn't as strongly correlated with IQ for a person who hasn't had a standard education, hasn't been exposed to a certain body of knowledge.  For example, the math section is going to be a problem if you don't know what the terms mean or what the notation represents.  You won't be able to understand the reading passages properly if you haven't been exposed to a lot of words, facts, and ideas.  You will probably have trouble with the science section if you haven't had to interpret data presented in different ways.

Based on how she described her education and, frankly, on how well her book was written (I was not at all impressed), I have a hard time believing that her innate intelligence was somehow responsible for her getting that score.  There had to have been more input somewhere along the line.

Have you taken the ACT yourself recently?

[Lecka]

The ACT has changed a lot since I took it.  But, I took it about the same time as this author, I think.

I think when I took the ACT — it is like posters are saying, you could do well on it as a generally smart person.  

When I have seen samples and test prep for the current ACT — I think it has changed a lot.  I wouldn’t think the same way about it now.  
 

 

[Lecka]

When I took the ACT I would say 3 out of 4 sections were just reading comprehension tests.  
 

Then for math…. Maybe she didn’t do as well on math and it brought her score down.  
 

I really do find it plausible for someone in my age group, it was a different test than it is now. 
 

That’s my impression, but it is the impression that I have.  
 

 

[Lecka]

The science section was just another reading comprehension section when I took the ACT.  
 

In my memory, at least.

 

But I remember being surprised by how little science there really was in it, it was more like it was just non-fiction writing, in my memory.  
 

I took it several times trying to get a 32, I never got it.  I scored high enough in every section over different times, but I never got them on the same time.  I was always getting things like 30, 31, 31, 32.  Or 31, 31, 31, 32.  
 

I had test prep materials but other than math, it was about having a good vocabulary and being able to read quickly enough, and I consider those skills I developed by reading on my own, more than learning in school.

 

I liked my school and I had good experiences in high school, so I’m not knocking that at all.  I just don’t think that the test was very related to school content at that time.  
 

Edit:  things worked out for me even though I didn’t qualify for the highest state regent scholarship at the time (based on ACT score).  I just kept thinking I would be able to get it because I was so close.  
 

Edit:  but yeah I have a lot of opinions about the ACT from that era.  

Edited May 25, 2023 by Lecka

[Kidlit]

I'm not sure how I feel about the ACT and honestly hadn't considered that it has changed.  I made a 32 and my husband made a 31 back in the day (early '90s), and both of our kids who have taken it as high schoolers have managed to meet or beat our scores.  Maybe I should pat myself on the back for homeschooling them for most of their educations (they both went to institutional high school). 🤣🤣🤣

 

Anyway, I DO think the math would be hard to score very high on without some formal learning, but I'm no expert. 

[thatfirstsip]

I am about her age; I took it several years before her, in very early middle school (so late 90s). I got a similar composite. I'd had nothing past decimals and fractions; a low math score was balanced by high in the other subtests. I didn't prep for it at all or know anything about it.

Her wiki page says she could read as a child and then studied on her own to prep for the ACT. A 28 composite is not a particularly high score.

[Lecka]

At the time I definitely knew classmates who were weak math students, but did great on the other 3 sections… yes math was low, but they could still get around that score as a composite.  
 

And most people at the time didn’t study or anything, or re-take.  I was an outlier at the time.  And it was hard for me to get test prep materials, I knew one classmate who had some and she gave them to me when she was done. It was just not a common thing at the time.

(Edited)

Edited May 25, 2023 by Lecka

[EKS]

30 minutes ago, thatfirstsip said:

A 28 composite is not a particularly high score.

It's at the 90th percentile.

I guess if she got 36s on the non-math subtests, she could have gotten a 4 on the math.  I can't image that BYU would accept someone with this profile, but what do I know?

Anyway, I still believe that she had more education than she claimed in the book.

[Kidlit]

1 minute ago, EKS said:

It's at the 90th percentile.

I guess if she got 36s on the non-math subtests, she could have gotten a 4 on the math.  I can't image that BYU would accept someone with this profile, but what do I know?

Anyway, I still believe that she had more education than she claimed in the book.

Yes!  Then national average now is somewhere around 20 or 21, so LOTS of students would love to have a 28!  While it's obviously not the highest you can make, it's nothing to sneeze at.  And I agree-I think she had more education than she recalled (or something). 

[thatfirstsip]

18 minutes ago, EKS said:

It's at the 90th percentile.

I guess if she got 36s on the non-math subtests, she could have gotten a 4 on the math.  I can't image that BYU would accept someone with this profile, but what do I know?

Anyway, I still believe that she had more education than she claimed in the book.

I got a low-20s on the math with just basic numeracy; my IQ is not wildly high. 

She test prepped for the ACT, she was taught to read as a child and had some books to read, she presumably was exposed at some point to fractions, decimals, and the four operations. 

If you have an IQ, especially verbal, that makes reading comprehension easy and test taking easy, it's just not that wild to be pretty educationally neglected and still get a 28 after some test prep. 

Presumably with a more rigorous or deliberate education she'd have needed no prep for a 33 or 34 in high school; I knew several kids like this, none of them were geniuses.

[KungFuPanda]

I’m less cynical about Westover’s account of her life. I thought she was very up front about not completely trusting her memory, and trauma will do that to you. I’ve seen many many homeschooling families start out strong then fizzle out in the high school years. I’ve also known so many highly intelligent people who also dealt with some form of mental illness. I think several of the kids probably had high IQs and there were educational materials in the house. It sounds like mom meant to homeschool but let life get in the way or it was just beyond her. They could have even had a healthy dose of the good kind of unschooling and her editors probably wouldn’t get that. Chapter after chapter explaining how she learned at home and how isn’t the most sensational part of her story. As a gifted young woman she probably resented the education she did get because for her it would feel inadequate. She can’t help but think how much more she would know if she had sane, organized parents or more traditional schooling. 
 

My humble opinion is that the contradictions pointed out in this thread don’t really have to be contradictions. She could absolutely be inadequately educated “for her” and know enough to get a 28 on her ACTs. 

[EKS]

Ok, I've now read the pertinent parts of Educating, and I see no reason to disbelieve what the author says about how she homeschooled and her educational philosophy.  I can absolutely see how someone who was homeschooled in that way could easily get a 28 on the ACT and go on to earn a graduate degree.

[Brittany1116]

I think I am a similar age to Tara, so likely took ACT at a similar point in time. I was top of my class at a poor-to-middling school and got a 32 with no prep. My lowest score was a 27 or 28 in math. I think I could have made at least a 34 with proper guidance and test prep, but I do not consider myself far above average in intellect. I did know people outside of my school and in college who were not excellent students but prepped HARD and got higher scores than I, so I think those test books probably go a long way. 

[Not_a_Number]

1 hour ago, EKS said:

Ok, I've now read the pertinent parts of Educating, and I see no reason to disbelieve what the author says about how she homeschooled and her educational philosophy.  I can absolutely see how someone who was homeschooled in that way could easily get a 28 on the ACT and go on to earn a graduate degree.

What does she say, if you don’t mind relating?

[maize]

Anecdotally, I've heard many homeschool moms tell stories of things they did in homeschooling that their kids totally forgot about by adulthood. I imagine it is true of most kids that they forget far more than they remember. 

I actually had an experience this week that brought home to me how much of my own childhood I have forgotten.  One of my sisters recently digitized some old family videos. One of them was from when I was about 11; my grandpa (owner of the video camera) was visiting and videoed a string trio rehearsal--myself and two siblings--coached by one of our music teachers.

I have no memory at all of string trio rehearsals at that age, but after watching the video my brain did dredge up a vague recollection of that trio being part of a recital that I do remember playing a solo for. I'm pretty sure that the trio rehearsals were an ongoing, weekly event...but had it not been for that video I would never have remembered them.

How many other things do we forget? I don't, for example,  remember all the classes I took for each year of high school. Things that are everyday, ordinary things just don't make their way into our permanent memory most of the time.

[EKS]

10 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:

What does she say, if you don’t mind relating?

It sounds like it was a household that was headed by intelligent, curious people who ensured that there were lots of resources, books, whatever available to the kids.  It also sounds like, at a minimum, she did give the kids a decent basic education and possibly more.  This did not come across at all in Educated.

[EKS]

7 minutes ago, maize said:

Anecdotally, I've heard many homeschool moms tell stories of things they did in homeschooling that their kids totally forgot about by adulthood. I imagine it is true of most kids that they forget far more than they remember. 

YES!  We have this here.  I drives me crazy.

[Not_a_Number]

34 minutes ago, EKS said:

YES!  We have this here.  I drives me crazy.

I guess that makes sense. Only the most emotionally loaded memories stay. 

I suppose the corollary to that is that when someone's telling their story, it's really just about how their world felt to them . . . and sometimes, it's even how they THINK their world felt to them given how they're currently feeling. (I remember reading some fascinating thing about how people's view of the early years of their marriage changed depending on how they were feeling about their spouse now. They would rewrite their memories based on their current state! And then I unintentionally read some autobiographical writing that amply supported that thesis, which was fascinating.) 

So, like all feelings, they are meant to be taken seriously but not meant to be taken as facts about the world -- only facts about the internal life of a person.  

Edited May 26, 2023 by Not_a_Number

[prairiewindmomma]

Did she formally offer math and science instruction (not just access to books) in high school? 

[EKS]

28 minutes ago, prairiewindmomma said:

Did she formally offer math and science instruction (not just access to books) in high school? 

It didn't say.  My impression wasn't that it was a stellar education, just one that would allow a bright kid to get a 28 on the ACT.

Edited May 26, 2023 by EKS