Educated
Tara Westover’s memoir isn’t just about getting an education – it’s about the painful process of understanding that your reality is real, even when everyone around you denies it. It’s about unlearning and relearning everything you thought you knew.
The story begins in the mountains of Idaho, where Westover grows up in a family preparing for the end times. No birth certificate, no school, no doctors. Just the mountain, the junkyard, and her father’s increasingly paranoid worldview. Her description of this world is vivid – the smell of gasoline and metal in her father’s scrapyard, the herbs her mother stores in mason jars, the constant fear of the government coming to take them away.
It reminded me of the concept of “sensemaking” we often discuss in product management – how humans construct meaning from their experiences. Westover had to become her own ethnographer, studying the world she grew up in while simultaneously trying to escape it.
There’s a moment in the book when Westover, now at Cambridge University, learns about the Holocaust for the first time. Her professor assumes she’s making a sophisticated point about historical revisionism when she asks if everyone knows about this event. This scene captures something essential about education – how it’s not just about acquiring knowledge, but about realizing what you don’t know you don’t know.
Her journey from mountain isolation to Cambridge and Harvard isn’t a simple rags-to-riches story. It’s messier, more complex. Education becomes both salvation and separation. Each book she reads, each idea she encounters, drives a wedge between her and her family. It’s the price of seeing the world differently – you can never unsee it.
The concept of education in Westover’s memoir goes beyond formal schooling. It’s about learning to question, to doubt, to examine. In product development, we talk about “strong opinions, weakly held” – the ability to believe something firmly while remaining open to being wrong. Westover had to learn this skill not just for building products, but for reconstructing her own reality.
It’s a reminder that the ability to learn, to change your mind, to admit you might be wrong – these aren’t just academic skills.
