Educated: Chapters 30–40

That voice had many timbres, many tones.

The room suited my father perfectly: it was larger than life and wonderfully incongruous.

I watched him closely that night, and to me it seemed he was trying to live in both worlds, to be a loyal adherent to all creeds.

What was needed—what Emily needed—was a woman emancipated from pretense, a woman who could show herself to be a man. Voice an opinion. Take action in scorn of deference.

I wrote an essay on John Stuart Mill’s concept of self-sovereignty, and my supervisor, Dr. David Runciman, said that if my dissertation was of the same quality, I might be accepted to Cambridge for a PhD.

She had built that business, with all those people working for her, and it dwarfed my father’s business, and all the other businesses in the whole town; she, that docile woman, had a power in her the rest of us couldn’t contemplate.

I became a popular dinner guest, with my stories of hunting and horses, of scrapping and fighting mountain fires. Of my brilliant mother, midwife and entrepreneur; of my eccentric father, junkman and zealot.

I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak.

I saw my role as reconnaissance: I was there to relay information, to tell Dad that Shawn had threatened Audrey, because Dad would know what to do.

I could not give this woman credence because I, of all people, knew how crippling her psychological injuries were.

His right hand, which he often raised to point at some feature or other, was knotted and twisted, and when I gazed at it, set against Harvard’s antediluvian steeples and columns, it seemed to me the claw of some mythical creature.

Tyler talked for a long time, moving through the events quickly but lingering in a wasteland of rationalization and self-recrimination.

On the other hand, secular histories tended to overlook spiritual movements like Mormonism altogether.

My dissertation gave a different shape to history, one that was neither Mormon nor anti-Mormon, neither spiritual nor profane.

Now, as I passed through King’s College, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny.