Linny tells Nancy about her latest deployment to the Texas floods by the American Red Cross. The American Red Cross deploys qualified and trained volunteers to disasters throughout the US and world. Eventually we get to our September book which is a memoir by Tara Westover, titled EDUCATED. In this book Tara recounts her experience growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho, living mostly in isolation with her family, no formal education, not much money, and few ties to the surrounding community. Against all odds, Tara decides to follow the example of an estranged brother who has gone to college. Her quest for knowledge takes her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University, and further and further divided from the family that was once her world. This book has it all, really. It’s a true story, but there are family dynamics and dysfunction, mental illness, violence and rehabilitation, great inborn talents, poverty and freakish business success, ignorance and intelligence, unbelievable cruelty and deep kindness. EDUCATED was published in 2022. It was a #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, And Boston Globe Bestseller. It was One of President Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of The Year, Bill Gates’S Holiday Reading List, A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of The Century. Finalist: National Book Critics Circle’s Award in Autobiography and John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Linny says this is the kind of book that Nancy and Linny could talk about for hours, laying on a bed. It was riveting and had so many components. Linny said she had no idea what she was getting into. Nancy agreed that she thought it would mostly be a story about education. In the end, Nancy thought it was a book about identity. Linny liked Nancy’s assessment. Linny loved the complexity of the family’s dysfunction and mental health issues. Tara is the youngest of seven children. They are raised by a domineering and religious father, Gene. Their mother, Faye, is submissive and though she doesn’t seem to totally agree with Gene’s unhealthy prepper fixation, she is too weak to oppose him. Gene’s behavior becomes stranger as the children grow up. By the time Tara comes along, things are very dysfunctional. Their household is poorly kept and stinks with the smell of rotting food and is dirty. Tara is supposed to be home-schooled, but in reality, there is no schooling. Tara’s father owns a junkyard and presses his children into working with him with little regard to their safety. Men, including her brothers, are considered ‘better’ and they are all misogynists. Tara would later determine her father had bipolar disorder as he alternated between periods of depression and mania. He had a terrible temper, little regard for safety, self-aggrandizing opinions, and expected unconditional obedience. Nancy says reading the book and that family dynamic, it made sense to her that Tara idolized her father, since he was seen as an unquestioned prophet with a direct connection to God. As Tara gets older, she starts seeing cracks in her father’s edifice. His prophecies don’t come to fruition. She notices her mother, though extremely submissive, allows her to do things, but then won’t stand up to Gene when things blow up. Instead, Tara is left to defend herself. Tara doesn’t like how her family basically disowns her brother, Luke, who decides to go to BYU. The lesson is if you disobey you are expelled. Tara suffers physical and emotional abuse but even in her journals, she downplays the problems and lies to herself about the abuse she is experiencing. Her brother Shawn is like a more violent Gene who is allowed to be physically abusive to (and nearly kill) Tara, her older sister, Audrey, and his various girlfriends and his eventual wife. No one really calls him to task but instead it isn’t happening. She is basically given a choice of “believe the family stories of how the world operates or be cast out.” Linny says the entire family is in denial. Linny says growing up, Shaun likely sees that power is important for survival. He tests his power over his girlfriend, then Tara, his wife, and his father. Feeling powerless, doesn’t feel good, so he finds a way to escape it. Linny likes how we see Tara as a little girl and her unquestioning acceptance of Gene’s beliefs. As she grows up, we see how the trauma impacts her ability to even acknowledge what has happened to her. She reads old journals and talks with her siblings and her parents to figure out what actually happened. Often, everyone has a different viewpoint of what happened. Linny notes that she is a child, so memories of childhood are spotty. The fight or flight is activated by the brain’s amygdala but this is also where memories are captured and where emotions are. Linny observes that Tara focuses on trying to get the facts correct, but she tells these terrifying stories without much emotion. It’s like she has to distance herself from the emotions to evaluate her memories and present the facts as she understands them. Linny thinks Tara’s dealing with the facts is likely healing to Tara. Getting to the emotion will be a lifelong journey. Nancy says Tara is helped, as she is growing up, by having loving other people in her life who reflect back to her what they are seeing in her family that is not healthy, and is actually dangerous. Linny says it is unethical for her to diagnose Gene and Faye without having met them and only relying on a child’s point of view and without knowing their personal histories, but she talks about what she would want to explore and rule out. She would look for a mood disorder, such as major depression, she would be looking for bipolar and schizophrenia, with anxiety and paranoia. She’d want to look at personality disorders, too, that are a different section of the DSM. Gene has no friends. He is hard to get along with. What might jump out is paranoid personality disorder, borderline disorder, and schizotypal personality disorder. Nancy says if this was a novel, people would say the writer had gone too far. She is woefully ignorant about the basics of academics. At one point she alienates a new friend by asking in class what the Holocaust is. Her classmates think she is a Holocaust-denier, but she had actually never heard of the Holocaust. She needs to keep good grades to keep her scholarship, and has to work as a janitor to support herself. She develops ulcers and insomnia and strep and mono, and serious dental and mental health problems. While she’s struggling, her mother’s small herbal business has become fantastically successful and the Westover’s become rich and now employ many people in the surrounding communities. Along with the wealth, this gives them power and status. Gene had once been thought of as a sort of survivalist crackpot but now people are afraid to go against him because their family members are employed by him, as are many of Tara’s siblings and their spouses. Tara attempts to convince her parents that Shawn is a threat – he has threatened to kill her, but they refuse to listen to her and turn the rest of the family and most of the community against her. Linny notes that Tara is a young woman who still needs support, but her family doesn’t provide it, leaving her in an unstable situation. She, however, needs to focus on survival. In graduate school, she is able to move on to addressing her mental health and getting counseling. Nancy asks Linny why Gene and Faye insisted on protecting Shawn. Linny says it’s impossible to believe that Faye denied hearing Shaun mistreat and nearly kill Tara. Linny says Gene obviously has some issues, so now let’s look at Faye. Obviously, there is something going on with her to allow this to happen. There are also likely cultural and religious influences, as well. She allows Gene to put all of his children’s lives at risk, too. Linny says we would never allow anyone to mistreat our children, but she is focusing on the mental health issues that would make someone overlook that. Nancy protests that at times in the book, Faye knows exactly what she is doing and will tell Tara, privately, the family issues, but will deny all of it when back at home. Linny agrees Faye is responsible and perhaps more responsible because she recognizes what it is happening and she refuses to address it. Nancy says that Tara still doesn’t really recognize the damage her mother has done in her life. Linny says that’s part of the beauty of the book: you see the progress she’s made but you see where she has yet to go. Her siblings each go different paths, some staying in the dysfunction and others getting out. Linny and Nancy both thought this book was a 10 out of 10.