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Westover, Tara. Educated: a Memoir. Random House, 2018.

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For the first time, Tara realizes that she is different from everyone else. She realizes that she doesn't exist to the government; she doesn't have a birth certificate like everyone else. Tara lives near a highway and she observes a school bus chugging along it. Tara also describes the mountains that surround her or as she calls it, the Princess. She refers to Princess often throughout the autobiography as that is a symbol of her home land. "I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don't go to school." (xiv)

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Tara begins to show an interest in school. Her grandmother that isn't apart of her father's ideas about the government, invites to take Tara with her back to Arizona so she can begin attending school. Her grandmother would sneak her off in the middle of the night and drive them both down to the grandma's home and by the time that Monday rolled around Tara would be enrolled in school. Her parents might not even have noticed that she had left as she could just be playing in the woods. Unfortunately, Tara ends up not going to school at that time.

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Person in the Eyes of the Government (3)

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Person in the Eyes of the Government (3)

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Tara's older brother, Luke, has just turned fifteen. He wants to enroll in Driver's Ed so he can begin driving. To do this, he of course needs a valid birth certificate. Seeing as his father would clearly object to this as the father believes that the government is out to get them, Luke instead goes to his mother. His mother never discusses this with her husband (as far as the author knows) so she instead goes out a birth certificate for Luke and all of Tara's other siblings that don't have birth certificates, including Tara herself. "Once she had begun the paperwork for Luke, Mother decided she might as well get birth certificates for all of us." (19)

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When Tara is ten, her whole family decides to go on a road trip outside the boundaries of the Princess. This is a huge deal for everyone. For Tara, she is for the first time leaving her beloved mountains. Luke (now 17) is driving and he falls asleep at the wheel. A serious car accident occurs in which the mother receives serious brain damage. She is never the same again. Throughout the results of the event, the father contemplates calling 911 and sending for an ambulance. This would go against everything he stands for as a person with believing that they cannot rely on the government or the government is corrupt. The end up receiving treatment as the crash is so disastrous.

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Tyler, one of Tara's older brothers, wants to pursue an education at college. Her dad doesn't like this as he believes Tyler is going to side with the Illuminati now. As Tyler prepares to leave, she gets a glimpse into the life of proper education.

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Tara's brother Luke is caught on fire helping her father. His legs get doused in gasoline, Luke forgets about it and sparks a small flame next to is leg. In moments, the flames are eating their way up his pant leg. As Tara's mother is gone for the day, she is stuck having to treat and extinguish Luke's legs. She doesn't treat his leg according to her mother's standards but she the best she could with in the circumstances. Later on, Tara thinks back that if she were able to, she would have given Luke morphine for his pain later as he was recovering. "That's when I saw that the jeans on his left leg were gone, melted away." (69)

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Tara begins working for as much money as she can manage. She babysits and sorts nuts whenever she is able to. She wants to get away from her father most of the day; the money being an added bonus. Sooner or later, Tara decides to spend her money. She takes lessons for piano, and soon finds her way to a dance studio. While taking her dance lessons, she interacts with other children. However, they all ignore her. Due to her winter recital required clothes attire, her father forbids her from dancing or learning piano. Instead of dancing or playing piano, she instead takes up voice lessons. Tara excels at this and she sings in her church. Her father shows up to ever single performance she takes part in. "However long he'd worked in the junkyard, he was never too tired to drive across the valley to hear me." (82)

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Acquiring fame from her fabulous church performances with singing, Tara is invited to audition for the musical Annie in a town nearby. Her father allows her to take part and Tara gets the lead as Annie. Through her play rehearsals, she imagines what it would be like to be more normal and fit in with everyone else. She meets a girl that is kind of like her, in terms of their lifestyle at home. Tara manages to meet a boy named Charles and she develops what we assume is a crush on him.

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Tony needs Shawn to drive his semi truck and deliver some supplies for a little while. Shawn takes Tara with him. As they travel across the Northwest, Shawn teaches Tara martial arts and how to defend herself in case she is attacked. Tara and Shawn get along wonderfully throughout the trip. Later, when they return home, Shawn meets a seventeen year old girl named Sadie. He is verbally abusive to her and countinuely demands services from her while then demanding she get him a totally different object instead. This is a drastic change from his typical kind persona towards Tara. Later, Shawn attacks Tara in the bathroom after he demands something from her and she doesn't obey. He almost breaks her arm, but Tara remembers what he taught her about self defence to try to escape. She fails but gets out safe. Tara doesn't tell anyone.

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Tara is now fifteen. Her body is changing and she feels it attract more attention from outsiders. Her doing anything with herself, such as wearing different clothes or shorter skirts, can be seen as if she were impure. As she takes more interest in Charles, Shawn notices Tara's actions and appearance around him. Shawn dumps his girlfriend Sadie and Tara thinks things will go back to how they were before with Shawn not abusing her physically and verbally. They don't. In the end, Shawn punches Tara to a pulp. She doesn't recover very well, emotionally. Tyler comes back home from college to help save Tara from Shawn. He tells her that she can go to college too if she just gets a good score on the ACT. She sets her mind towards this prospect of hope to get away from her father's lifestyle. "'Just pass the ACT. One lousy test.'" (120)

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Tara begins studying for the ACT test. She has her mom and brother Tyler help her learn trigonometry. Eventually it starts to make more sense. Her father has taken up a job building an industrial building and he needs Shawn's help a lot. As Tara spends time studying at her grandmother's house, she is called by her mother to do go down to the hospital. Shawn got into an accident and fell head first onto the concrete below. His head is internally bleeding, but his father doesn't seem to really care right at the moment that it happens. The doctors have to perform several surgeries on Shawn and his medical bill grows higher and higher. Tara takes care of Shawn when he is taken back home. The doctor's tell his family that his mood and personality will likely change drastically.

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To get into the only school she believes she has a chance in, BYU, Tara must achieve a score of 27 on the ACT. After a lot of studying in all 4 subjects, Tara receives a score of 22. At this point, Tara realizes that she cannot be stuck with her dad for much longer. If she doesn't escape she will forever be a child. Her father is against her going to BYU, but she continues to work hard to get in and get a good score on the ACT. Tara starts working on a deadly machine, against Shawn's wishes. "I would remain a child, in perpetuity, always, or I would lose him." (133)

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One day, while Tara is studying again for the ACT, Shawn gets into another accident. His brain is coming out of his head, nearly. Yet, Tara's father wants Shawn back at home, insisting that her mother can fix it. Tara takes him to the hospital instead. Her father is a little pissed with Tara, but in the end he is a little grateful. Tara once more takes the ACT and she gets a 28. She applies for BYU and gets accepted. She will start in the New Year. "I applied to BYU a week later." (148)

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Tara enrolls in the wrong classes. She accidently makes a joke about the Holocaust, having never learned about it before. Her classes are going really bad as she never had a proper education. Her roommates don't act proper and they don't conform to God's words. All in all, Tara pushes through and tries her best.

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After talking to one of her history professors about her class choices, the professor suggests applying for a study abroad program at Cambridge organized by her professor. Her professor states that this experience could "broaden her horizons." Tara applies for the position in England. She is rejected, but her professor can make arrangements to let her partake despite the rejection. While Tara is at Cambridge, she excels spectacularly. She can apply for a Gates scholarship to get a full ride scholarship to Cambridge. She gets the scholarship. Tara finally graduates from BYU also.

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Tara is studying for her PhD in history at Cambridge. She also returns to Buck's Peak. There she finds that Shawn has no changed and that her mother lied to her. Shawn has received no help and no one believes her when she says that he does. As time passes, her family begins believing that Tara has been possessed by the devil. As she goes on, she will not give up her education so she does not go through with an exorcism that would take place. Tara slowly loses her siblings to her dad as they do not want to be associated with 'the devil'. Her mother states that she will only speak to Tara if Tara also speaks with her father.

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Tara learns about feminism. As she goes back to visit her family for the holidays, she sees her feminist side come out. Her father has built a gargantuan extension to the house which Tara calls the Chapel. One day, while everyone is in the Chapel, Shawn's wife, Emily, bursts into the room in hysterics. Everyone gathers around her, wondering if Emily's premature son is okay and asking if Emily herself is okay. Emily tells about how Shawn had hurt her. Slowly, over the course of several weeks, stories come out about what Shawn has done to several girls including Tara and her sister. Because of this, Tara and her mother have a heart to heart discussion discussing how her mother should have been there when Shawn was abusing her instead of just standing by. Her mother speaks once more with Tara a week later saying that Shawn is getting help. "'It's being dealt with," she said. "I told your father what you and your sister said. Shawn will get help.'" (272)

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Tara is failing college. Some of her first final exams are coming up. She tries studying but it doesn't end up well for her. She starts cheating off her Mormon friend Vanessa. Tara asks if she can study with Vanessa. Vanessa points out that Tara could read textbook and not just look at all the pictures. After that day, Vanessa doesn't talk to Tara anymore, but Tara does pass all her classes with flying colors (except for Western Civilization).

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Tara arrives back home after the end of the semester at BYU. Back at home, Tara is hired back at the supermarket but ends up quitting to go work for her father again, reluctantly of course. Tara starts hanging out with Charles. They begin dating, although it's unspoken. He attempts to hold her hand and get closer but her upbringing forces her to be very cautious around boys for fear of being accused of something "unholy".

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Tara is called from her sister about her father. She needs to hurry back home from BYU in Utah to their home in Idaho. Her father has been burned, third degree burns covering his entire body nearly. Her mother treats the burns just as she did with Luke's burns years before. Tara's father can hardly move or take in any water. He is extremely dehydrated, but once more he refuses to go to the hospital. "'If you hurry - leave right now - you can say goodbye.'" (215)

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As Tara is home for the summer, Shawn continues to abuse her. He attacks her while Charles is over and Tara insists to Charles that this is normal behavior. Tara has her first experience with proper medicine after she suffers from an earache. She struggles in the new semester at college with advanced algebra. She ends up passing through an extremely rigorous schedule. During Thanksgiving, Tara has another abusive encounter with Shawn where she finally realizes that what Shawn is doing to her isn't for her protection but for his own pleasure. "Then a part of me understands, even as I begin to argue against it, that my humiliation was the cause of that pleasure." (196)

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In the end, Tara receives her PhD in history. She loses all her family members except Tyler, Richard, and Tony along with her Aunt Angie. She tells about how the only way she is now able to love her father despite his flaws is if she understands that she made decisions that led her where she is, not her dad. Her whole story of growing up could be described as betrayal or false, but she calls it an education. "I call it an education." (329)

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Author Tara Westover’s Incredible Story About Leaving Her Strict Survivalist Family

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Tara Westover Sings at the 2019 Northeastern University Commencement

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ara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days in rural Idaho with radical survivalist Mormon parents. She didn't get a birth certificate until she was nine and had no medical records because her father did not believe in doctors. She and her six older siblings worked in her father's junkyard. As she grew older, her father's beliefs became more extreme and one of her brothers grew violent. At 17, she decided to educate herself as a means of escape. Within 10 years she had earned a PhD in intellectual history and political thought from Cambridge but was estranged from her parents and half of her siblings. Now 31 and still living in Cambridge, she has written a powerful memoir, Educated, about the transformative power of education and the price she had to pay for it.

Can you describe your childhood?
It was very isolated. Because I didn't go to school I didn't have friends in the way other people do. The only people I knew were the children of families like ours, who were home-schooled, anti-doctor, and we didn't see them that often. I think I was 13 when I first went to another child's house who went to school. I didn't ask her back because she teased me about not knowing what a fraction was.

Do you have any warm memories from growing up?
I have a lot, actually. The mountain where we lived was a beautiful place and the scrapyard was fun in many ways; it was exotic. My mother was a midwife and a herbalist so we would go on these long walks, looking for yarrow or rosehips or whatever she needed to make her tinctures. I also have a lot of good memories of breaking horses with my brother Shawn before he became violent. There was a dramatic moment when I was on a runaway horse and he actually saved my life heroically.

As you grew older Shawn began to bully and abuse you. He pulled you around by your hair, broke your wrist, flushed your head in the toilet, killed the family dog and threatened to kill you, too. How did this begin?
When I was 15 and he found me smudging my eyes with my sister's mascara. He couldn't stand seeing me grow up to be a woman. He regularly called me a whore and a slut. Whenever he hurt me he was always really apologetic afterwards. He tried to say it was just a game that he hadn't meant to harm me, and it was always my brother's version of events rather than mine that I wrote down in my journals. I made myself believe it was true.

How could your parents have turned a blind eye to what was going on?
That's the biggest question of my life. I was reluctant to speak to my parents about it for a long time because I didn't want to acknowledge the unthinkable - that they already knew but had done nothing about it.

Was that what finally led to the rift between you and your family?
Yes. What broke us was not me going to college against my father's will or even leaving home to go to Cambridge. It was me speaking openly about my brother Shawn being violent and abusive to me. My parents couldn't deal with that so they turned the other way and made me look like the bad person. In families like mine there is no crime worse than telling the truth.

Can you see yourself becoming reconciled with them?
I will always hope that we might be reconciled, and I hope for the sake of my brother's wife and family that he's mellowed and changed. But while I'll always watch for signs that the family culture has shifted away from secrets and enabling, I don't wait for them.

Do you miss your family?
I miss them every day, but I can also feel comfortable with my decision not to have them in my life.

Would you recommend going to college or university with no prior experience of school?
No! Not at all. I felt like the only dancer on stage who had missed rehearsal. And I made some excruciating missteps, like the time I was in a European history lecture and I asked what the Holocaust was. No one believed I didn't know. They all thought I was some kind of racist. But then again, after years of knowing virtually nothing at all I found learning so exciting. I piled up books and read late into the night. Sometimes I barely slept.

How do you feel about this very personal book being published?
I am already in pre-emptive therapy with a brand new therapist. You probably think I'm joking but I'm not. I told him, "I'm fine right now but in two weeks when this book comes out I might be freaking out."

You say "brand new" - have you been in therapy before?
I had a mental breakdown while doing my PhD at Cambridge, soon after I cut off contact with my parents, and I started seeing the university counsellor, one of the best decisions I ever made. There's something very nourishing in setting aside an hour a week to talk. The act of admitting that I needed something I couldn't provide for myself was immensely helpful.

You write with the flair of a novelist. How did you learn that?
Everything I wrote at the beginning was awful. Then I became obsessed with the New Yorker fiction podcast.You can hear these wonderful things like Margaret Atwood reading a Mavis Gallant story and then she and Deborah Treisman, the New Yorker fiction editor, will discuss why it works. They'll bring up all these weird little things that writers do that make it much easier to say - "Yeah, I can do that too".

How do you feel about Mormonism?
I feel very grateful to the church and to [the Mormon] Brigham Young University, where I first went to college, but I can't reconcile myself to the church's teachings on women, like women not being allowed to be church leaders and polygamy in the afterlife . I tried to be a Mormon feminist but that was exhausting.

What do you do just for the hell of it?
I have very non-eccentric hobbies. I like to read, to have dinner with friends and junk out on TV like everybody else. I love to walk my dog, who is a little white monstrosity. In Idaho they'd call him a fake dog.

What next? Back to academia?
I think I might try some more writing. It was so hard learning how to do it properly it seems a waste of all that effort not to do more of it.

Educated by Tara Westover is published by Hutchinson (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99

This article was updated on 18 February to correct some errors, including about Mormonism and plural marriage.

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Tara Westover: 'In families like mine there is no crime worse than telling the truth.'

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ara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days in rural Idaho with radical survivalist Mormon parents. She didn't get a birth certificate until she was nine and had no medical records because her father did not believe in doctors. She and her six older siblings worked in her father's junkyard.

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Biography of Tara Westover by Tara Westover

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Biography of Tara Westover by Tara Westover

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Tara Westover is an American author. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. An older brother taught her to read, and after that her education was erratic and haphazard, with most of her days spent working in her father's junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. After that first encounter with education she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008 and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She received an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009 and in 2014 was awarded a PhD in history. Currently, she is a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center, working on projects related to media and political polarization.

is her first book.

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Tara Westover is an American author. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. An older brother taught her to read, and after that her education was erratic and haphazard, with most of her days spent working in her father's junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother.

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Tara Westover in an Interview with Bill Gates

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Tara Westover in an Interview with Bill Gates

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Educated is even better than you've heard

Melinda and I loved Tara Westover's journey from the mountains of Idaho to the halls of Cambridge.

I've always prided myself on my ability to teach myself things. Whenever I don't know a lot about something, I'll read a textbook or watch an online course until I do.

I thought I was pretty good at teaching myself-until I read Tara Westover's memoir Educated. Her ability to learn on her own blows mine right out of the water. I was thrilled to sit down with her recently to talk about the book.

Tara was raised in a Mormon survivalist home in rural Idaho. Her dad had very non-mainstream views about the government. He believed doomsday was coming, and that the family should interact with the health and education systems as little as possible. As a result, she didn't step foot in a classroom until she was 17, and major medical crises went untreated (her mother suffered a brain injury in a car accident and never fully recovered).

Because Tara and her six siblings worked at their father's junkyard from a young age, none of them received any kind of proper homeschooling. She had to teach herself algebra and trigonometry and self-studied for the , which she did well enough on to gain admission to Brigham Young University. Eventually, she earned her doctorate in intellectual history from Cambridge University. (Full disclosure: she was a Gates Scholar, which I didn't even know until I reached that part of the book.)

Educated is an amazing story, and I get why it's spent so much time on the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It reminded me in some ways of the Netflix documentary , which I recently watched. Both explore people who remove themselves from society because they have these beliefs and knowledge that they think make them more enlightened. Their belief systems benefit from their separateness, and you're forced to be either in or out.

But unlike Wild, Wild Country-which revels in the strangeness of its subjects- Educated doesn't feel voyeuristic. Tara is never cruel, even when she's writing about some of her father's most fringe beliefs. It's clear that her whole family, including her mom and dad, is energetic and talented. Whatever their ideas are, they pursue them.

Of the seven Westover siblings, three of them-including Tara-left home, and all three have earned Ph.D.s. Three doctorates in one family would be remarkable even for a more "conventional" household. I think there must've been something about their childhood that gave them a degree of toughness and helped them persevere. Her dad taught the kids that they could teach themselves anything, and Tara's success is a testament to that.

I found it fascinating how it took studying philosophy and history in school for Tara to trust her own perception of the world. Because she never went to school, her worldview was entirely shaped by her dad. He believed in conspiracy theories, and so she did, too. It wasn't until she went to BYU that she realized there were other perspectives on things her dad had presented as fact. For example, she had never heard of the Holocaust until her art history professor mentioned it. She had to research the subject to form her own opinion that was separate from her dad's.

Her experience is an extreme version of something everyone goes through with their parents. At some point in your childhood, you go from thinking they know everything to seeing them as adults with limitations. I'm sad that Tara is estranged from a lot of her family because of this process, but the path she's taken and the life she's built for herself are truly inspiring.

When you meet her, you don't have any impression of all the turmoil she's gone through. She's so articulate about the traumas of her childhood, including the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of one brother. I was impressed by how she talks so candidly about how naïve she once was-most of us find it difficult to talk about our own ignorance.

I was especially interested to hear her take on polarization in America. Although it's not a political book, Educated touches on a number of the divides in our country: red states versus blue states, rural versus urban, college-educated versus not. Since she's spent her whole life moving between these worlds, I asked Tara what she thought. She told me she was disappointed in what she called the "breaking of charity"-an idea that comes from the Salem witch trials and refers to the moment when two members of the same group break apart and become different tribes.

"I worry that education is becoming a stick that some people use to beat other people into submission or becoming something that people feel arrogant about," she said. "I think education is really just a process of self-discovery-of developing a sense of self and what you think. I think of [it] as this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing."

Tara's process of self-discovery is beautifully captured in Educated. It's the kind of book that I think everyone will enjoy, no matter what genre you usually pick up. She's a talented writer, and I suspect this book isn't the last we'll hear from her. I can't wait to see what she does next.

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Educated is even better than you've heard

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Educated is even better than you've heard Melinda and I loved Tara Westover's journey from the mountains of Idaho to the halls of Cambridge. I've always prided myself on my ability to teach myself things. Whenever I don't know a lot about something, I'll read a textbook or watch an online course until I do.