教育助她飛離原生家庭

文/米歇爾·迪安 譯/孫美萍

A coming-of-age memoir that chronicles a young woman’s efforts to study her way out of a tough childhood in Idaho and find herself through books.

《你當像鳥飛往你的山》是一部成長回憶錄，記述了一位年輕女子如何通過學習走出她在愛達荷州的苦難童年，以及她通過書籍發現自我的經歷。

2We hear a lot about the edges of the US these days.Geographically, these places might be in the middle of the continent, but they are on the periphery of the country’s economic life, and often the social one too.The people who live there are desperate and pitiable, we are told, just as much as they are brutal and superstitious.

2近來，我們聽到許多關于美國邊緣地區的消息。從地理位置來看，這些地方可能位于美國的中部，但它們處在這個國家經濟生活的邊緣，而且通常也是社會生活的邊緣。有人告訴我們，生活在那里的人們既絕望又可憐，正如他們既野蠻又迷信一樣。

3Tara Westover’s memoir is about being from just such a place and people.She was born to Mormon fundamentalist parents in Idaho, the youngest of seven.Her father Gene was the prophet of their small family, convinced the world was going to end at the stroke of the millennium.(When it did not, the author observes, the “disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this”.) He does not believe in sending his children to school, but does believe that dairy products are sinful,owing to a message from God.“Isaiah doesn’t say which is evil, butter or honey,” is how he delivers the good news.“But if you ask, the Lord will tell you!”

3塔拉·韋斯特弗的回憶錄講的就是出身于這樣一個地方、來自這樣一個群體的故事。她出生在愛達荷州的一個摩門教原教旨主義教徒家庭，是七個孩子中最小的一個。父親吉恩是他們小家庭中的預言家，他堅信世界會在千禧年到來的那一刻終結。（然而，世界并沒有終結。作者寫道：“他眉目間的失望看起來是如此孩子氣，一時間我想知道上帝怎么可以剝奪他見證預言成真的機會。”）他不贊成把孩子送去學校，但是相信乳制品是有罪的，這是他從上帝那里得來的信息。“以賽亞沒有說奶油和蜂蜜哪個是罪惡的，”他這樣傳遞福音，“但是如果你詢問，上帝必會告訴你！”

4Faye, Westover’s mother, largely defers to2defer to 順從，遵從。her husband, in spite of what evidently were some doubts about the divinity of his testimony.She finds some independence in her roles as a kind of faith healer and as an experienced but apparently unlicensed midwife.Eventually, she takes up essential oils, something called muscle testing,and “energy work”.That all these activities appear somewhat contrary to Mormon religious doctrine is something Westover never explicitly addresses.In the same manner that her child self once did, she seems to accept her mother’s explanations.Muscle testing, for example, is an “act of faith in which God spoke through her fingers”.

4韋斯特弗的母親法耶在很大程度上順從丈夫，盡管她明顯對丈夫作為上帝見證人的神性有點懷疑。作為一名某種意義上的信仰治療師以及一名經驗豐富但顯然沒有執照的助產士，她在自己的角色中找到了些許獨立性。最后，母親致力于精油事業，也就是所謂的肌肉力量測試和“能量工作”。這些活動似乎多少都與摩門教信條背道而馳，但韋斯特弗對此從沒有明確提及。就像她幼時曾經做過的那樣，她似乎接受了母親的解釋。例如，肌肉力量測試是“表達信仰的行為，上帝通過她的手指來發話”。

5In this account—Westover’s family dispute her version of events—life is grim in all the ways one might expect.Money is a constant struggle; Gene works largely in scrap metal but it isn’t enough.Cars driven by exhausted family members crash during long drives,but hospitals and western medicine are forbidden so injuries persist and fester.An amazing number of freak accidents befall the male Westovers: leg shreddings, burnings.The author herself is repeatedly beaten and abused by an elder brother who charges into3charge into 沖進。her room while she’s sleeping and fastens his hands around her throat, calling her a whore because of her friendship with a local boy.

6And she gradually makes her way out of all of it.She has no formal education but manages to study her way to college.She struggles initially but gets good enough marks to do a PhD at Cambridge.And in the course of all that, Westover writes, she found herself—through what some might call a“transformation” and others a “betrayal”.As she puts it in the last line of the book: “I call it an education.”

5在這樣的敘述中——韋斯特弗的家人否認她對各個事件的看法——生活的方方面面都和人們所能想到的一樣嚴峻。錢總是不夠花。吉恩主要撿廢銅爛鐵來賣，但是這還不夠。疲憊的家庭成員們在長途駕駛過程中發生了車禍，但是家里禁止去醫院或吃西藥，因此傷口始終不愈合并漸漸潰爛。韋斯特弗家的男性成員身上發生了數量驚人的怪異事故：腿部撕裂、燒傷。作者本人多次遭到其中一位哥哥的毆打和虐待。哥哥趁她睡覺時沖進她的房間，雙手掐住她的喉嚨，叫她妓女，因為她與當地一個男孩交朋友。

6作者逐漸擺脫了這一切。她沒有接受過正規教育，但她成功地通過學習進入了大學。剛開始她學得很艱難，但還是憑借著足夠好的成績赴劍橋攻讀博士學位。韋斯特弗寫道，在整個過程中，她發現了自我——通過一些人稱作“轉變”而另一些人稱作“背叛”的方式。正如她在書的最后一行所說：“我稱之為教育。”

7如果是在2 0世紀9 0年代，尖刻的專欄作家可能僅憑摘要就給這本書打上流派標簽，嘲笑它是“苦難文學”的典型。這些講述苦難出身的紀實作品一度非常流行，弗蘭克·麥考特的《安琪拉的灰燼》以及奧古斯滕·伯勒斯的《拿著剪刀奔跑》都曾占據暢銷書排行榜榜首。批評家傾向于譴責這些書經常從頭到尾充斥著感傷——書中的人不是惡棍就是英雄，真實生活的錯綜復雜被壓縮成簡單的孰是孰非的問題。當詹姆斯·弗雷的《百萬碎片》最終被證明基本都是空話時，各地的書評人都暗自高興。他們說自己早就知道了。他們早就知道這些書是騙人的情節劇。

7If this were the 1990s, a snarky columnist might have already slapped a genre label on this book from the summary alone, deriding it as an example of“misery lit4苦難文學，一種文學類型，以傳記文學為主，主要是關于主人公戰勝創傷或苦難的故事。”.These chronicles of tough beginnings were enormously popular; Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors topped bestseller charts.Critics are apt to castigate the sentimentalism that often thuds5thud 砰的一聲重擊。through these books—people in them are villains and heroes, the messiness of real life condensed into easier answers about who was right or wrong.And when James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces turned out to be largely bunk6bunk 假話，空話，廢話。, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced.They knew it, they said.They knew these books were dishonest melodramas7melodrama 情節劇；通俗劇；情節劇式故事（或小說）。這類作品的情境險惡多變，矛盾沖突尖銳激烈，劇情發展中包含大量偶然及巧合的因素，充滿緊張的戲劇場面。.

8韋斯特弗的敘事風格——插曲式、沉思式以及重復式——并沒有像許多書那樣采用情節劇形式。她的聲音略顯單薄，仿佛以漂浮的塑料薄膜為支撐，好像還處在建造自我的過程中。除了將她視為一個善于表達的痛苦旋渦，人們基本感知不到她。《你當像鳥飛往你的山》依賴一種別出心裁的比喻，即韋斯特弗被書籍所拯救。但是到最后我有一種感覺，我們的敘述者仍然隱藏于學位和證書之后，不太情愿露出真容。我不斷地想到瑪麗·卡爾的《說謊者俱樂部》。這部回憶錄講的是她在得克薩斯州艱難困苦的成長經歷，我想到卡爾的聲音是多么難以讓人忽視。

8Westover’s narrative style—episodic, meditative and repetitive—doesn’t embrace melodrama to the extent that many of those books did.Her voice is slightly flimsy8flimsy 脆弱的；淺薄的。, scaffolding9scaffolding 腳手架；骨架。with sheets of plastic floating off, as if still in the process of building itself.Other than as a sort of articulate vortex of suffering,one hasn’t much of a sense of her.Educated relies on the conceit that Westover was saved by books, but at the end I had a sense of our narrator still hiding behind her degrees and certificates, not quite ready to step into the light.I kept thinking of Mary Karr’s The Liars’Club, a memoir of her hardscrabble10hardscrabble 艱難困苦的。Texas upbringing, and how Karr’s voice was one you couldn’t ignore.

9Like Karr, Westover has a story to tell that shouldn’t be ignored.Her background says something important about the US: that even in a place of great opportunity, you can grow up without any idea of how to touch its white-hot centre.This memoir tracks all the ways that traditional American life puts up roadblocks and actively dissuades you from outgrowing your “roots”.There are insights here that could compete with JD Vance’s problematic and more ideological Hillbilly Elegy—if only they were more directly articulated.■

9如卡爾一樣，韋斯特弗也要講述一個不應該被忽視的故事。她的背景說明了一個有關美國的重要問題：即使身處一個充滿絕佳機遇的地方，你也有可能不知道如何接近它的白熱中心，并在這種無知的狀態下成長。這部回憶錄全面記錄了傳統的美國生活如何設置障礙并極力阻止一個人超越自己的“根”。書中的一些見解可以和J.D.萬斯頗具問題性以及更具意識形態色彩的《鄉下人的悲歌》媲美——要是那些見解能更直接地表達出來就好了。 □