Tuesday, October 30, 2018

a very peculiar education

The day after Fall for the Book Festival, I left for Australia with my sister Stephanie.  We were going to see my first grandchild, James Horatio, who was born in Sydney on September 1.

We stayed at an airbnb in Paddington and began each morning at the Ampersand bookshop cafe,  drinking flat whites, and surrounded by secondhand books.

My sister Steph with her morning coffee

Then we picked up pastries at the Trinity bakery further along Oxford Street, and took them to Alex and Katie's apartment where we had breakfast and worshiped the newborn baby.  Sometimes we held him and sometimes we watched him and sometimes we provided a little back up.  Sometimes all of us, baby included, ventured out to a pub for lunch or to a street festival or to take in the Sculpture by the Sea along the walk from Bondi to Tamarama Beach.  We walked through Centennial Park and into an Aboriginal sanctuary of flying foxes (the largest bats on the planet - they were up in the trees in the thousands, hanging there like enormous pods).

Alex walking the baby in Centennial Park

 My cup was running over, except that meanwhile I had a deadline approaching. The holiday newsletter at Politics and Prose back home was going to press, and as a result I was furiously reading and writing reviews for Karl Ove Knausgaard's Intermittent - Anne Tyler's Clock Dance -  and Tara Westover's Educated.

 I'm sure that by now you've heard quite enough on the subject of Karl Ove from me (and Anne Tyler too for that matter).  But it's the last book I want to tell you about now : Tara Westover's memoir Educated about growing up in Bucks Peak Idaho as the daughter of Mormon Survivalists.  This is the book that took up so much mental space while I held my beautiful grandchild in my arms. It made for a strange juxtaposition.

First of all, Westover's father was barking mad. He never sent her or any of her siblings to school or to the doctors, and she didn't even have a birth certificate until she was eleven. His world was his land, the church and his scrap metal yard. And in that scrap metal yard Tara Westover worked as a child,  all the while listening to her father ranting about the imposition of “west coast socialism on the good people of Idaho.”   She also helped her mother deliver babies across the county, and prepared her "head for the hills" backpack, full of supplies in case the End of the World came - that, or Y2K.    I mean, I've read Hillbilly Elegy - but this book goes way further in describing  the forgotten ones who live off the grid on the fringes of American society.

As I read Educated I found myself repeatedly drawing my breath in horror.  The odds were stacked so deeply against this woman - whose older brother liked to shove her face into the toilet and call her a whore, because her dance classes were part of Satan’s deception. They claimed to teach dance but actually taught promiscuity.  It wasn’t that she had done something wrong.  “so much," she writes, "as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.”

So while I held my six week old grandson in my arms, this pure little person with a lifetime ahead of him,  I couldn't help reflecting on human frailty.  How do so many of us make it out of childhood and into adulthood, I wondered, when we depend so entirely on others, not just for comfort, but for our survival. For mental and emotional health and balance. 

And yet, against all odds, Tara Westover turned her back on the life that was mapped out for her.  When she began her studies at Brigham Young University she was woefully unprepared.  She had never heard of the Holocaust and thought that Europe was a country. She had only vaguely heard the word Shakespeare.  But she wanted to learn “how the gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality.”   This hunger for knowledge and understanding led her to study at Cambridge University and from there to earn a PhD from Harvard - drawn to such “unwomanly” subjects as law, politics and Jewish History.



"Gosh Mand," said my sister Steph  as I gasped in horror at what I was reading, as Katie nursed James, and Alex prepared a risotto for our dinner.   "What's going on now?"  she asked.  Usually somebody was being abused - Tara was being beaten up by her older brother Shawn - or somebody had been severely burned at the scrap yard or had their teeth knocked out. Nobody cared. This was just life, and sucking it up was how you got by.

Let me just say here that Educated isn't the sort of thing you should read if you've just had a new baby.  I told Katie she couldn't possibly read it.  When you have a new baby you feel too tender for material like this.  I remember renting the film Nicolas and Alexandra  after giving birth to my daughter Rosalind. We were watching it on VHS in Caracas Venezuela where we lived, and when the part about Alexei having hemophilia came up, my mother asked, "Are you sure you want to watch this, darling?"

No - I didn't want to watch it.  I couldn't.  Couldn't bear to hear about children in danger, being neglected or abused. Such material was all but off limits for at least another decade.

Nevertheless, when I finished Educated I dearly wanted someone else to read it.  So I left my copy in Katie and Alex's apartment.  Perhaps Alex will pick it up at some point - or better yet,  maybe he will donate it to the Ampersand bookshop. That would make me very happy.


Ampersand Bookshop in Paddington

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