Life stories

Educated

Tara Westover

A memoir of a girl who grew up outside school in the mountains of Idaho and found her own way to a doctorate

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  • Published 2018

Introduction

Tara Westover grew up on a mountain farm in Idaho, the youngest of seven children. She writes that her father distrusted government, hospitals and public schools, and expected a time of upheaval for which the family prepared. She did not go to school as a child. At seventeen she entered university, and her studies later took her to Cambridge and Harvard, and to a doctorate in history.

The book follows three stretches of her life: her childhood in Idaho; her first years of study at Brigham Young University and her first summer at Cambridge; and her later years at Cambridge and Harvard, when she had to decide how much of her family's way of seeing the world she could keep. It is a story about what learning gave her, and about the distance it opened between her and part of her family.

In an author's note, Westover says the story is not about Mormonism or any other form of religious belief: the people in it include believers and non-believers, some kind and some not.

Some names in the book are changed. Westover's parents, through a lawyer, have disputed parts of her account, and in footnotes and a closing note she herself marks places where relatives remember events differently.

  1. 1In Westover's telling, her childhood was shaped by her father's expectation of hard days ahead and his distrust of schools, doctors and government
  2. 2At home, learning was whatever each child taught themselves, and an older brother showed her another path
  3. 3To enter university she needed to pass one test, so she taught herself the mathematics and grammar it required
  4. 4At university she discovered how much she did not know, and learned how to learn it
  5. 5Teachers who saw more in her than she saw in herself opened the way to Cambridge
  6. 6She learned to read books neither with worship nor with fear, and to trust her own judgment
  7. 7Westover writes that when she raised an older brother's violence with her family, she was doubted rather than helped
  8. 8Westover writes that her father offered a blessing that would have brought her back into the family, and she saw that the price was her own mind
  9. 9Keeping her own account of her life cost her much of her family, but she found support elsewhere
  10. 10She came to call the change in herself an education, not a betrayal

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