A Matter of Control

 

Today I finally finished Educated by Tara Westover. After weeks of reading it slowly at breakfast, one short chapter at a time, I finally read the last few all at once in a blur of pages while waiting for my takeaway at Mum's Place, waiting for the guys to finish washing my car at the car spa near the restaurant and waiting for the rice to cook at Dadda's place. I have come over to have lunch with him and take his chiming clock to the shop I had bought it (it was a Christmas present for him).

The book riveted me but each chapter was so concentrated that, short and simple as they were, I had to keep coming up for air. One chapter a day at breakfast, was the best I could manage.

And there is a gap here between the last time I updated this blog and the books I read. I read a few substantial tomes...Walter Isaacson's biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and a few lighter novels which I had fully intended to write about, but the moment passed and I got caught up in other stuff. I may still revisit those books in these pages but I'm not holding myself to any promises.

I loved this book although I sometimes found it difficult to read, especially everything about her violent brother, Shawn, who, among other things, broke her wrist and shoved her face into the toilet until she called herself a whore.

And the family lived in this conspiracy of silence. What Shawn did was forgivable. Talking about it wasn't. And so Tara, who makes it to Brigham Young University and then to Cambridge and Harvard finds herself getting educated and her perspective broadening.

Calling a spade a spade, even to herself was the hardest thing. It is easier to go along with what everybody (our everybodies being made up of the people most important to us) says than to hold on to what we know as truth. So we lie to ourselves and get split apart.

The tension inside her is so strong that she has a nervous breakdown and gets addicted to box sets, watching endless episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other such gems on her laptop instead of working on her thesis.

A lot of the scenes are very stark. Westover describes everything so simply and beautifully, but it hurts so much to read that you need to stop and breathe deeply from time to time. For this book does that. It makes you hold your breath.

I couldn't read more than a chapter at a time, which is saying something for a person like me who skims through books, setting them up like a to-do list I have to get through.

A bad habit.

I took it slow, this time.

Real slow.