Group Names: Harper Elder, Braxton Caldwell, Swetha Iyer, Daija Sky Oaks

Educated: Week 2 Discussion

Please use a different color font for answers.

Roles

List any absent group members:

● Facilitator/Prioritizer: Harper
● Recorder: Braxton
● Connector: Swetha
● Questioner: Daija

Notes

1. In the Author’s Note, Westover cautions that this memoir is not about Mormonism or “any form of
religious belief,” and that she rejects a negative or positive correlation between believing or not
believing and being kind or not being kind. But her father Gene’s faith is a sort of character in this book,
informing how he sees the world. What did you make of Chapter 8, “Tiny Harlots,” which moves from
Gene’s distrust of Westover’s dance recital uniform to his pride over her singing in church?
Gene really wants control. Maybe not conscious but his largest desire is control. Only ok with giving up
control if he benefits from it. Ok with her singing because it brings him pride. Dance recital people think
he is nuts but singing is within a community he feels more comfortable with. People are more proud of
Tara within the church. You can value people for the wrong reasons. Gene sees his children and wife as
assets. He also has common behaviors and emotions of hubris and trying to do certain things that
benefit only himself, but at the same time he takes it to a new extreme and expects everyone else's lives
to revolve around him and his emotions.

2. In Chapter 9, the anticlimactic passing of “Y2K” confirms that Tara’s home is a place ruled by her
father’s grand—but false—delusions. Tara is beginning to grasp the fact that her father doesn’t know
everything, and that his ideas and beliefs may actually be harmful. Tara’s father seems “smaller” to her
—she can see the “childlike” disappointment in his features as he reckons with the fact that the world
has continued spinning on. Why do you think this realization is happening now? What is it that is making
Tara start to question those beliefs and values?
She was engulfed in the fear of January 1st so the let down clearly showed he was wrong. First clear
example of something he said was factually wrong. Also impacted by the influence of others who had
been educated and gaining outside knowledge that her father wouldn't give her. People always say that
the end is near, especially within religion, but it never has happened. Knowing that the world will end
makes people feel more valuable and gives them a purpose. Religions tell people to live their lives in
God's path. It ultimately can come back to the control that Gene wants, because he is utilizing the fear
of the end in order to control them .
3. By Chapter 12, “Fish Eyes,” we are introduced to Shawn’s abuse of Westover and the other women in
his life, which recurs throughout the book. When Westover starts crying over one of these early
incidents, she writes that she is crying from the pain, not from Shawn hurting her, and that she sees
herself as “unbreakable.” She also writes that his abuse not affecting her “was its effect.” Why is this
insight important?
She wants to be unbreakable because the person she loves is breaking her physically but she doesn't
want her psyche to be broken. Tara is excusing his behavior because she loves him. Sometimes the only
way to live in a situation like this is shutting yourself away from the pain. It's more painful to recognize
the person you care for is wrong than just taking the abuse. Physical abuse isn't necessarily as bad as
mental and emotional abuse. With Tara she doesn't have the proper coping mechanisms that are
impacted by the fact that when she was young these were the only people that she really interacted
with so she knows nothing outside of the abuse. This is similar to “Their Eyes Were Watching God” when
Janie is married to Joe in that he keeps demeaning and mentally abusing her, but she keeps excusing his
behavior as a way to believe that he is still the person that she fell in love with, but after he dies she
strats so see the abuse that he inflicted upon her and was able to free herself from the bounds that he
put her in. THis is similar to Tara in that she starts to base her actions off of what she believes Shawn
would think of them and putting her into this mental state where she thinks of him as the old shawn and
believes that the abuse is just part of his love for her.

4. In Chapter 14, Shawn has a major accident and gets a head injury. Tara explains that she has heard
conflicting accounts of Shawn's fall. At the end of the chapter, Tara talks about how she convinced
herself that "any cruelty on his part was entirely new. I can read my journals from his period and trace
the evolution--of a young girl rewriting her history. In the reality she constructed for herself nothing had
been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet" (131). Why do humans often "rewrite" their history?
Is it a function of memory? Does it have something to do with the brain? Why did Tara ultimately
"rewrite" it?
She uses his brain injury as an excuse. She doesn’t want to believe that Shawn is just a bad person. She
is using this as a way to avoid confronting this idea that Shawn is trying to purposely hurt her, but that it
was out of his control because he was injured and that means that she has to accept it to help him . She
knows nothing will change so she decides to change herself subconsciously. This explains the cycle of
abuse and Shawn may be copying his father who copied him before him. She also doesn't want to
experience that pain, so she tries to excuse it and doesn't want to experience the pain and the loss of
love if she were to speak out about it.

5. Is Gene as bad as Shawn? Or does he damage her as much as Shawn does? Why or why not? How do
their behaviors reflect each other?
Gene is as bad as Shawn but not as aggressively bad. Shawn doesn't recognize the brevity of what he
does. Gene thinks he is doing the right thing and that everything he does will benefit his family. Shawn
seems like he wants to punish the women who he thinks are sluts because he cares about them and
thinks they won't go to heaven unless he corrects it. People lose sight of the morals and consequences
of how they get to a goal when it is what they are striving for their entire life. There are at least three
generations of abuse within the family. Gene's maternal figure was not as present so he polices the
women in his life which influences Shawn. Both of them see this need to always have the maternal and
womanly figure in their life, and in order to sustain it they overpower their mentality with their own.
Both of them are also completely isolating their families from outside forces, because they don’t want to
have things that remove these people away from them.
Summary:

Our group's largest takeaway from this was the abuse cycle as well as the mentality that victims have to
face when growing up in a family that is so isolated and there are no sources for them to really reach out
and come to terms. Theory starts excusing other behaviors to preserve the familial connection that they
have and also they attempt to try and normalize this behavior in the hope that the behavior will stop
when it won’t.The mentality that victims of abuse often take is one of blaming themselves and
alleviating blame from their abusers. When Tara is abused by her brother, she is quick to claim she
doesn’t feel anything and after his accident she excuses his cruelty because of his brain injury. This is a
mentality that many victims take on as it is less painful for them to dismiss it or blame themselves than
confront that people are bad.