Educated

Summary (from the publisher): An unforgettable memoir in the tradition of The Glass Castle about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University.

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard.

Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it. 

Review: Author Tara Westover was raised in an unconventional family of survivalists that shunned doctors, formal education, and any sort of government intervention. One of seven children, Tara and her siblings were all expected to work in her father's junkyard to help support the family, which led to most members of the family experiencing horrific accidents, but yet even the most terrible of injuries was treated at home. Eventually, unwilling to face more of her father's delusions as well as abuse from one of her siblings, Tara begins exploring ways to get away from her family home on her own terms and manages to go to college. However, she quickly begins to realize how different her upbringing has been from the rest of society and how uneducated she truly is. For instance, even upon entering college, Tara didn't know that you should wash your hands after using the bathroom and had never heard of the Holocaust before reading about it in class as a freshman. 

Westover does an excellent job of relaying her story without coming across as overly self-pitying. Similarly, her achievements are wildly impressive, even for someone who had an excellent high school experience, let alone someone who never had formal education before college, yet Tara never comes across as bragging or lauding her own accomplishments over her readers. It was extremely difficult to read many sections of this book, including all the many gruesome injuries experienced by Tara and her family members, many seemingly caused by the negligence of her father. 

This was an incredibly powerful and moving memoir that hits on a lot of topics including alternative lifestyles, abuse, mental illness, faith, family loyalty, higher education, coming to terms with one's own false perceptions, and the fickle nature of memory. It is clear that writing this memoir was a type of catharsis for her as she grappled to come to the terms with the dissonance between her life and her family's beliefs and worked to accept that love was not enough to keep her within their orbit anymore. 

Stars: 4

Related Titles: 

• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
• North of Normal by Cea Sunrise Person
• Goodbye, Sweet Girl by Kelly Sundberg