It doesn’t take long to get sucked into Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated. Her descriptions of scenery, people, and actions are vivid and sometimes poetic. The real beauty of Educated, however, is Westover’s use of the double vantage point throughout the book. Sometimes it is a simple sentence or two, like when she talks about her brother, Tyler, leaving the family to start his own life, and says “I have almost no memory of him until five years later, when I am fifteen, and he bursts into my life at a critical moment. By then we are strangers” (31). Or on page 296, recounting meeting a young man who knows her violent brother, Shawn. The young man explains how Shawn had “both hands wrapped around my cousin’s neck, and he was smashing her head into a brick wall.” Westover writes: “And there it was. A witness. An impartial account. But by the time I heard it, I no longer needed to hear it. The fever of self-doubt had broken long ago. That’s not to say I trusted my memory absolutely, but I trusted it as much as I trusted anybody else’s, and more than some people’s. But that was years away” (296). She gives the reader a peek inside her transformation while reminding the reader there is more to come. One can’t help but keep reading to discover how she gets there.
Her use of the double vantage point also comes in paragraphs, taking the reader on a short trip to the future in order to share what she has learned about her family, and herself. A good example of this is when she writes that her “Dad had just turned forty when the Feds laid siege to the Weavers, an event that confirmed his worst fears. After that he was at war, even if the war was only in his head” (29). She continues by taking the reader ahead in time 14 years, when she “would sit in a university classroom and listen to a professor of psychology describe something called bipolar disorder” (29), and then revealing that “the notion that a person could be functional, lucid, persuasive, and something could still be wrong, had never occurred” (29) to her. In a paragraph, Westover has masterfully teased the reader with what is to come and how much she and the reader are still is to learn, while demonstrating that she, and the reader, have learned a great deal already. In other words, Westover’s use of the double vantage point throughout the book lets her and the reader take the journey together, with the comfort of knowing she did more than simply survive.