Reading Educated was a confusing experience. As with many bestsellers, it feels disorienting when you can't respond to a book in the way the vast majority of readers have. The quality of writing and story-telling felt very uneven. Early on in the book, it was hard to see the point of some events that Westover describes in great detail. Yet the seminal events that lead to transformation in her life are only mentioned in the passing, sometimes so trivialized that the reader might almost miss it.
These lines probably explain why she tells her story the way she does. Her stance throughout the telling of her story is of someone who is observing from the outside but not connected to the events being narrated. When the events in question are so brutal, that distancing can feel discordant. Here she reflects on her mental state after horrific physical abuse by her brother Shawn:
This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.
There are many encounters with Shawn that take place before and after this event. Each is described in a lot of detail. Yet, her years in Cambridge, the hard-fought successes at BYU that helped her get there received a very cursory treatment. The reader is not able to appreciate her astounding mental growth over a relatively short period of time. Even as she achieves impossible things, the past is like a vortex pulling her back in. The force never seems to abate. Somehow the dots did not connect for me till the end.
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