The ethics of writing about others

Notes on Tara Westover's excellent memoir Educated

From The Atlantic

Several friends recommended Tara Westover’s memoir Educated when it came out in 2018. I’m not sure why I didn’t pick it up immediately. It might have been that the arc felt extreme: a provincial launched from an Idaho cult into Cambridge and Harvard. Or maybe it was that the story felt too close to home since it followed my own narrative closely in some respects, only with more of the dramatic flair that commercial publishers prefer. It’s possible that I expected it to read like Yellowstone or Longmire or other over-the-top representations of the West. 

I was wholly unprepared for the sense of kinship I felt when I began browsing Westover’s book in the stacks at the public library. She is a consummate stylist, and from the opening pages she captures the sweet-sour knowledge of belonging to a place — feeling that bond deeper than the bone — and yet knowing that a whole life will be impossible there. 

For years I have believed that those of us raised in the Mountain West enjoy an unspoken understanding. It comes from the seagreen color of the water, the way rivers cut through bedrock, how — when you are standing on that rock and watching whitewater boil beneath your feet — you feel that you have arrived somewhere near the beginning of time. It is the black and green blanket of timber against the ridgelines, horse pastures, and alfalfa fields, a melancholy color scheme that turns to green and gold in the fall, when the smell of wood smoke piques a deep yearning. No one can inhabit the place without tiptoeing along the razor’s edge, and I’ve tried to share that wildness with my children. 

First camping trip with Linden in the Yaak Valley, August 2019. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

I recognized my own childhood in Westover’s description of Buck’s Peak:

“I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.” 

As well crafted as each sentence is, Westover’s internal struggle is what kept me enthralled to the end. She was raised on conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and the End of Days, and even after she had broken away from her family to attend Brigham Young University, she found herself reverting to the distrust of doctors and scientific medicine that she’d been steeped in all her life. It took a series of lucky breaks combined with hard work, talk therapy, and courage for her to find her way as a writer and scholar.

Perhaps nothing captures Westover’s struggle more than the question of how to tell her story truthfully. At several points she questions her own memory, wondering how to reconcile conflicting accounts of the same event. Sometimes the most honest way to close a scene is with a question mark. At other times she remembers her brother Shawn’s bullying all too well and knows that her family will only welcome her back into the fold if she renounces her trauma and accepts their sanitized version of his cruelty. 

Who we think we are is often constructed from who we understand ourselves to have been. Even after thriving at Cambridge and Harvard, Westover finds herself haunted by the identities her father and Shawn had constructed for her. Whore is Shawn’s favorite epithet, and her father rants about dance classes teaching immodesty and promiscuity. Nothing makes the binary choice between Westover’s independent identity and her family’s definition of who she is clearer than her father’s belief that a college education is “whoring after man’s knowledge.” Even when her older brother Tyler leaves to attend Brigham Young and urges her to study for the ACT, Westover feels trapped by the future her family has prepared for her:

“College was irrelevant to me. I knew how my life would play out: when I was eighteen or nineteen, I would get married. Dad would give me a corner of the farm, and my husband would put a house on it. Mother would teach me about herbs, and also about midwifery…. When I had children, Mother would deliver them, and one day, I supposed I would be the Midwife. I didn’t see where college fit in.” 

But she does break away, and after initially struggling with basic skills like note taking, she begins to thrive. Near the end of her undergraduate work at BYU, Westover is fortunate to win a place in a prestigious study abroad program at Cambridge. Her history professor, Dr. Kerry, had encouraged her to stretch herself by applying, to see what she might be capable of, and even though she was initially denied, Dr. Kerry intervened on her behalf and convinced Cambridge to offer her a place in the program. Westover’s supervisor at Cambridge happened to be the world-renowned historian Jonathan Steinberg, who would later write a letter of recommendation that helped Westover win admission to Harvard for a Ph.D. Both of these men urged Westover to believe in her latent gifts, as well as the future she could make for herself. Westover understands that by actively writing history, she can “construct a world to live in” after feeling like such a misfit in the world she’d been born into.

But Westover’s father remains unimpressed by these achievements. While visiting her at Harvard, he claims that her education — the road that has led her away from isolation and into the world — has turned her into a pawn of Lucifer. He forces his daughter to either accept his blessing with consecrated oil, which will purportedly cleanse her of all the wickedness that her college degrees have wrought, or to choose the ruinous future that he predicts for her. 

While some aspects of my upbringing dovetail with Westover’s, I was fortunate to have parents who encouraged my college ambitions. Even so, I was struck throughout Westover’s book by a familiar pattern: often the thing that fundamentalist families warn you about is the very thing they have inflicted on you. Westover’s father could only imagine a university education as the mirror image of his own brainwashing. What Westover discovered, instead, was that college allowed her to wrestle with ambiguity and to believe in her natural interests as good and worthy of nurturing. College allowed her to become the author, not merely the recipient, of history. To act, as Adrienne Rich might say, rather than being acted upon. 

It took courage to write Educated because Westover knew that members of her family would be hurt by her representation of them. It is a dilemma I often wrestle with as a memoirist: how to tell a truthful story without unnecessarily harming others. As Annie Dillard cautions us, memoir should be more than airing grievances. We don’t write nonfiction to get revenge. But it’s also true that the most powerful stories rise from danger zones that we are conditioned to minimize or avoid. My friend Bob Vivian says that if a writer starts out with love in their heart, they’ll end up in the right place. Yet too much of that mindset can lead to tiptoeing around uncomfortable material. 

Educated raises a perennial question for writers that is growing increasingly more fraught. How much of our experiences that involve other people are our own stories to tell, especially if those people are still living and especially if the light we cast them in is not terribly flattering? Sometimes the choice is as stark as Westover’s: telling our truths could irrevocably estrange us from family or friends. Some people tell it like they see it and let the chips fall where they may. But more often it’s a murkier question about weighing the importance of the story we have to tell against its possible harm to others. By my own standards, those danger zones are worth probing publicly if a story taps into a slice of human experience that is substantially larger than the author’s. 

Westover passes this test because she engages a larger conversation about the West. Her story reveals how much Western culture is still dominated by patriarchal conventions, even outside evangelical circles. In her family and in many others, the pillars of Western identity — self-reliance and stoicism — often shame anyone who can’t live up to them into silence. Many of us who grew up in poverty were taught to replace helplessness with resolve, refusing to weaken, the way we sometimes convinced ourselves that we felt sorry for people with money. It was how we turned hand-me-downs and mended clothes into badges of honor, even superiority. We can get by with less than you. We don’t need what you’ve got. 

I imagine that Westover is also writing, in part, to girls and young women who feel that their futures have already been determined by their families, showing a way out and a way forward, even if it requires extreme sacrifice. My first book was driven by a similar hope, that it might speak to another young person who felt alone in an evangelical home. I offered my parents a chance to read the manuscript before it was published and to challenge anything they felt was inaccurate. In some cases, I accepted their corrections. But memory is a reconstruction and interpretation of events, not a simple recollection of them. Some things that my parents found liberating proved oppressive to me. I did my best to imagine how it felt to be them while remaining true to my own memory.  

As I have begun work on another memoir, I’ve run into some of these questions again. How can I write truthfully about my experience of fatherhood without exposing some of the harm done to me as a son? I believe these are my stories to tell publicly if they foster thoughtful discussions of how young men are socialized. One of these stories will be published in the Winter issue of The Missouri Review. In one scene I recall harvesting firewood with my father. To save time, he proposed rolling fifty-pound wheels of wood down the slope to the road, where I was to stop them with our double-bitted axe. I brought one wheel to rest that way, but the others came at me like punted footballs and crashed away down the slope below the road. We bagged that plan, not because it was foolhardy or dangerous, but because I wasn’t man enough to pull it off. Just as Westover often internalizes her father’s and brother’s insults, I felt sure at the time that I was to blame. Only now, from the distance of years and experience as a father, can I question the premise. I believe it’s a story worth telling because many fathers still raise their sons in this way: subjecting them to tests of one kind or another to make men of them. I know I am not alone in feeling that fatherhood has required me to unlearn a great deal of what I was taught by the men in my life.

I’d never write about my life if I didn’t feel that it could serve readers in some important way. Maybe it requires a certain hubris to presume that my experiences could speak to others, but paradoxically this assumption also makes me approach my work humbly. There’s nothing about me, alone, or my advancement as a writer, that justifies writing about others. There has to be a public good behind it: challenging the ritual hazing that has defined father-son relationships in the West for generations or asking why it is that so many men seem incapable of distinguishing fatherhood from manhood, assuming that a man’s man doesn’t need to think any differently of himself as a husband or father. If these questions are urgent enough, I think they are worth pursuing even if they cause my father some discomfort. And I also consider it my obligation to balance the difficult stories with more affirming ones about the love of the outdoors that my father gave to me and that we can both share with my children.

Camping with Linden and my father in the Yaak Valley, August 2019. Photos by Joshua Doležal.

I have often imagined how I would respond if one of my children were to write a memoir one day, if they were to air memories publicly that I thought ought to remain private or if they were to paint a picture of me that I found hurtful. If I’ve encouraged them to follow their passions and forge independent identities, and if I’ve celebrated their achievements, chances are good that I’d come off okay in the retelling. But even if that was not the case, I hope I’d understand that the story wasn’t fundamentally about me. 

Westover didn’t write her memoir to get back at her parents. Her mother seems to have interpreted it that way, publishing her own book, Educating, as a defiant response. It’s true that most memoirists have personal motivations, and for Tara Westover those might have been to make order out of chaos in her past and to reclaim her voice after years of being shamed into silence. If her goal was anything like mine, she was trying to write her way into a world that she’d been raised to believe was not hers to claim. To bridge the gap between the isolation of her youth and the mainstream culture of her time. 

But Westover was also trying, as a serious writer, to tell the truth. That is an extraordinary gift to readers. I love her book because it does not hew to a prefabricated conclusion. She is not out to tell a fashionable story about women or Mormonism. She is not preaching to a choir. She’s out on the ledge, all by herself, trying to make sense of her life in conversation with her time. The truth is elusive, and sometimes the truths about our past are more approximations than certainties. “We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell,” Westover writes in her conclusion, “This is the best I can do: to tell that other story next to the one I remember.” 

It’s a helpful reminder as I continue sorting through my own memories: to choose my stories carefully, to represent others fairly without airbrushing their flaws, and to leave enough of the dots unconnected that a reader can finish the story within herself.