Educated: A Memoir

Tara Westover did not attend school. Her family, deeply religious and deeply suspicious of government, kept her and her siblings at home on a mountain in Idaho. She worked in her father’s junkyard, witnessed violence within the family, and had no official record of her existence until she was in her teens. Then she taught herself enough to pass the ACT, got into Brigham Young University, and eventually earned a doctorate in intellectual history from Cambridge. Educated is about that journey, but it’s as much about what she had to leave behind to take it—specifically, the family members who remained in that world and felt her success as a betrayal. Westover writes with precision and some difficulty about memory itself: what she knows, what she can verify, and where her recollection conflicts with her family’s. A remarkable book about self-determination and the complicated relationship between education and belonging.