Reading Retrospective: Life Is Not A Thing Unalterable

Reading Retrospective on Tara Westover's Educated and Judy Blume's In the Unlikely Event: Life is Not a Thing Unalterable

“Life is not a thing unalterable.” –Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir

“Life is a series of unlikely events.” –Judy Blume, In the Unlikely Event

*Note: Spoilers for both books ahead*

I read Tara Westover’s memoir Educated simultaneously with Judy Blume’s semi-autobiographical novel In the Unlikely Event. Both books, especially the latter, surprised me, thrilled me, and filled me with an unexpected medley of emotions.

Educated, although it took place in the time I grew up in, could have happened on a different planet. Westover’s childhood in rural Idaho, where she grew up with six older siblings and essentially no school (she was technically homeschooled, but other than learning to read, this doesn’t seem to have figured hugely for her), learning to make herbal medicine and work in a scrapyard, was worlds away from my suburban, Maryland public-school existence. On the other hand, Blume’s childhood, and that of her protagonist Miri, in 1950s suburban New Jersey more closely resembles mine, despite the noticeable difference in norms of the time (all girls and women wear dresses, women who ‘go to business’ are unusual).

But what hits me the most about both books are how the main characters grapple with the cultural backdrop of their time and place, and come out different. The protagonists are products of their time and place and yet emerge and grow in unexpected ways. Their remarkable, unlikely lives demonstrate that, even within given parameters, we choose our influences and can choose to direct our own growth.

As Westover observes, three of her siblings lack a high school education, while three, including her, have PhDs (the remaining sibling has a GED). They grew up in the same place, to the same parents, yet their lives significantly differ. She chose to follow the example of her older brother to go to college and graduate school, she allowed grandparents, aunts, and uncles to help her along the way where her parents couldn’t or wouldn’t. She chose to learn about and take courses on the Holocaust, which she had never heard of before college, and when asked, her father believed to be rigged by Jewish bankers. She refused to accept her father’s offering of a blessing back into the Mormon and family fold, if she would just take back her accusations against an older brother who abused her. These choices are so remarkable, in context, because to lose her family is to lose everything she has ever known. To lose the home where she grew up. The holidays she grew up with. The mother she still loves and longs for. Westover’s aching description of how easy it would be to give in illuminates the sharp, all-encompassing pull of religion and family:

The blessing was a mercy. He was offering me the same terms of surrender he had offered my sister. I imagined what a relief it must have been for her, to realize she could trade her reality—the one she shared with me—for his. How grateful she must have felt to pay such a modest price…I imagined my surrender…I imagined how I would describe my change, my divine transformation, what words of gratitude I would shout. The words were ready, fully formed, and waiting to leave my lips.

But when my mouth opened they vanished. (304)

Westover pays a steep price for what she calls her education, although she also articulates her gain: “The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she [her former self] would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self" (329).

Westover is able to form new, authentic relationships with others over the course of the book, including a few of her brothers, and her mother’s father and siblings, who do not believe her parents’ calumnies. She goes on to graduate with her PhD, visit Jordan, and continue to craft her own life.

Miri’s story is no less dramatic. Her life is shaped by the three (real) plane crashes within three

months in her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey. She is tied to her family, and her Jewish culture, in ways that become increasingly uncomfortable over the unlikely events of her fifteenth year. Although Blume makes each plane crash more devastating and emotionally volatile than the last, the truly unexpected events are those revealed by the crashes: the fault lines in the psyche of Miri’s best friend, Natalie; the love between Miri’s unwed mother and Natalie’s married father; and a move to Las Vegas, co-engineered by a Jewish gangster and Natalie’s father’s attempt to alleviate the trauma of the plane crashes for his daughters. Miri’s closest allies, her best friend and her mother, both betray her on the path to their own truths, as does her non-Jewish boyfriend. Even her traditional Jewish grandmother, Irene, embarks on a new path in life when she, a widow, becomes close with a Jewish man of her generation who is widowed by the first plane crash. Only one adult in her life does not betray Miri, her uncle, Henry, a reporter who becomes famous due to his coverage of the crashes. But despite Miri’s close relationship with her uncle, his new fame and impending marriage take him to a career in Washington D.C., leaving Miri to follow her mother and her former best friend’s father to a new life in Vegas.

Without the plane crashes, one wonders if any of the dramatic changes in Miri’s life would have occurred. Her mother’s new relationship blooms over late nights volunteering to bring coffee and food to Natalie’s father, Dr. O, a dentist tasked with identifying remains. Yet, as Blume reminds us, “life is a series of unlikely events.” Without the plane crashes, another series of events would have dictated the course of Miri’s life.

In the end, like Westover, Miri must take charge of her own life. She decides to come to Vegas, and make the most of it. She decides to follow in her Uncle Henry’s footsteps as a reporter, and decides to live and raise her family in Vegas, even when her Aunt Leah begs her to stay in Washington D.C. She chooses to keep her own name upon marriage, and builds an intriguing career for herself when that was more unusual for women.

Although the seeds of Miri’s choices are evident in the fifteen-year-old at the heart of the book, the particular ways in which they bloom are not. Miri is a conventional fifteen-year-old, dreaming of marriage and family, slips and cashmere sweaters. She wants the charmed, upper-middle-class suburban life that Natalie has at the beginning of the book, and does not seem well-suited to the weirdness of Vegas or ups and downs of a career in journalism. As Miri grows up, she decides to move away from her former self and to grow into someone new, not allowing her trauma and anger to overwhelm her life. Even more striking are the choice of Miri’s former friend, Natalie. When we last see Natalie as a teen, she has been transformed by her trauma and anger. However, when we revisit her as an adult, she has used her experiences to shape a career as a fortune teller and psychic, and the unwed mother of three children with three different fathers. Not much, from Natalie’s conventional upbringing or her teenage obsession with dance, could have prepared the reader for this future.

Both books situate a protagonist firmly in a place and time. Neither escapes the scars or repercussions of their upbringing, and yet both forge an adult life wholly unlike their childhood. I find both stories inspiring because of the impact of the characters’ choices in shaping their own lives, despite extraordinary circumstances not of their making. Both books were compelling reads for me due to the emotional pull exercised on both characters by their families. They both demonstrate beautifully that life, however unexpected, is more than the sum of its parts, if you make it so.