First time author Tara Westover wrote a memoir in her late
twenties titled, Educated. The New
York Times named the book one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 and it’s received
so many national awards you’d be bored to tears if I listed them all. Had I
known her age when I started reading the book I would have presumed that
someone so young couldn’t have lived enough life to be able to write a memoir
worthy of such critical acclaim but I would have been wrong. Born in Idaho to a
separatist Mormon father who didn’t trust the government, schools or doctors and mother
who was a self-taught herbalist and midwife, Tara was the youngest of seven
children and growing up her days were filled working alongside her brothers in
her father’s junk yard and in the evenings she helped her mother stew herbs.
Throw some physical abuse and doomsday prepping into the picture along with
some screw-ball ways of viewing the outside world, Tara definitely has a story
worth writing and reading about.
Tara was seventeen the first time she stepped inside a school, nor did she get a proper home schooling growing up, but she taught herself what she needed to know to pass the ACT test
and scored high enough to get into college. Fast forward to her Wikipedia page: Tara “…graduated magna
cum laude 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.” I
stayed up into the wee hours of the night three nights in a row to read this book
and when I was finished, I got on YouTube to watch five interviews. I couldn’t
get enough.
Two days after closing the last page I was in a group of
ten---at a cousin’s luncheon---and was delighted to find out that two of us had
read Educated, someone else was at a half way
point and another had just finished the first chapter. What are the odds of
that? Bottom line: I highly recommend this book but I am standing in line to do
it behind people like Barack Obama who said, “It’s one of my favorite books of
year” and Bill Gates who put it on his Holiday List and wrote, “Tara’s process
of self-discovery is beautifully captured in Educated. It’s the kind of book that I think everyone will enjoy,
no matter what genre you usually pick up.”
I’m calling this Culture Week because in addition to finding a haunting book, I also saw the movie
Downton Abbey with four of my Gathering Girls pals even though I must be the
only person on earth who couldn’t get into the TV series. I multitask when I
watch TV but so much of the story-line is carried in the facial expressions and
body language that I was missing more than I was getting. After a couple of
tries, I gave up. I figured with the movie I’d have to keep my eyes on the
screen.
“Lacking the nutritious story lines of the past, the movie
is mainly empty calories,” the New York Times movie critic wrote about the
film. “For a few fleeting moments,
they've returned us to a time of bygone glamor when class trumped crass and even
treachery was sweetly done,” wrote Mr. Travers at Rolling Stone. Hummm….which
one will turn out to be true for me I wondered before stepping foot inside the
theater.
We went on Cheap Tuesday and I expected the place would be packed
with women all lined up and itching to get a ticket like the senior version of
when the last Star Wars movie came
out only without the costumed people in attendance. I was shocked that we were
five of only fifteen people in the theater---much less than usually show up on
Cheap Tuesdays. Someone said all the seats over the weekend at all the showings
were filled so I can only surmise that elderly women don’t have as much patience
as I gave us credit for having. My movie companions are all fans of the series
and they were thrilled beyond containment to be there. Me? I had to force myself
to care about seeing Downton Abbey and after viewing the ten minute “tutorial”
for those of us who hadn’t seen the series that played just before the movie began I
was totally confused and realized why I couldn’t get into the series. It wasn't
just my multitasking habits, it was also the fact that there are just too many
characters for me to keep track of.
My bottom line on Downton Abbey? The movie and lunch
afterwards with my friends was fun. They loved, LOVED the movie and a couple of
them wanted to see it again. I got my six bucks worth just seeing the costumes
and antique cars, but I won’t be binge watching the series. ©
