Educated Essay

Autumn Yang

ENG 112,  (872AC)

Dr. Lucas

October 23, 2019

Mental Health 

In the book Educated by Tara Westover, she deals with a lot of mental and physical abuse. The abuse starts with her father and the way he treats and convinces them that the entire world is after them. As a young child, this can take an effect on you and mess up your trust and emotional connection to people. Usually, a girl would have someone like her mother to go to but Tara didn’t because her mother wouldn’t go against her father or the way he wanted things. Her mother and father had a very traditional marriage. Whatever the father wanted in the house everyone would do it as his word over everyone else’s. 

One thing the father passionately advocated is that the government was after him and his family. Since he believed this, his kids could not go to the doctors’ office or be allowed to go to school like normal kids. In reality this is illegal, but since the children had been born outside of a hospital, there were no real records of them existing. Since these were the rules, Tara didn’t get to take a step in a classroom until she was seventeen years old. School is something that many people take for granted and yet she couldn’t get a formal education until she was seventeen. The fact that she started learning so late but yet still became very successful and very inspiring shows that she worked very hard to get out of the situation she was in. 

Tara’s dad was very manipulative, after making his wife take the midwife job of delivering babies, she hated it and said she couldn’t continue doing it. Because of this he then told her,  “This is a calling from the Lord, and sometimes the Lord ask for hard things.” (15). He uses God to justify his wife doing a job she hates, and that is illegal. It shows his manipulative side a lot in the book but it is never pointed out. In the memoir, Tara’s father also shows sides of not supporting her and also supporting her. When she first wanted to be in plays he didn’t agree until after he heard her sing. After hearing her, he began to sing the theme song of the play himself. This shows that maybe her father is unintentionally manipulative. 

Another instance of Tara being abused by her family is when everybody turns a blind eye to her brother, Shawn abusing her. Her family would do nothing about it, but they intervened when Tara spoke up about it. They didn’t handle it like a normal family though. They blamed Tara and made her look like the bad guy from speaking out about it and that is what tore Tara and her family apart.

One thing to take away from this book is that you can do anything you put your mind to. Tara could’ve just went along with everything and sit back and do what everybody else wanted her to do, but if she would have done that she would’ve never got an education and never got away from her family. People would’ve never heard her story and she wouldn’t have got to inspire as many people as she did. Since she stood up for herself and made better of her life, she now has a best-selling book.