Educated (2018) is a memoir by the American author Tara Westover. In it, Westover recounts overcoming her survivalist Mormon family in order to go to college, and emphasizes the importance of education to enlarging her world. She details her journey from her isolated life in the mountains of Idaho to completing a PhD program in history at Cambridge University. She started college at the age of seventeen after having had no formal education, and her book explores her struggle to reconcile her desire to learn with the radical world she inhabited with her father.
As of the September 13, 2020 issue of The New York Times, the book had spent 132 consecutive weeks on the Hardcover Non-Fiction Best Seller list.It won a 2019 Alex Award and was shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prize, PEN America's Jean Stein Book Award, and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The memoir is told in three parts. The first part describes Westover's life from her birth on Buck's Peak, a mountain in rural Idaho, until she was accepted at Brigham Young University (BYU). Her parents, Gene and Faye Westover (pseudonyms) had decided to live in isolation. Her father was paranoid about hospitals, the public school system, and the government, due in part to the 1992 events of Ruby Ridge. The mother undertook most of the children's very loose homeschooling. Their father taught the children the "rhythms of the mountain". Tara describes sneaking away to visit her paternal grandparents. Although her mother received a serious brain injury, her father refused to take her to a hospital for treatment.
Tara's attempts to attend school or seek other normality in her life were denied by her father. He became depressed when the Y2K apocalypse did not occur. When Tara suffered a neck injury from a car accident, he refused to take her to the hospital. Her estranged brother Shawn helped her with that, and the two initially grow closer. But Shawn started physically abusing her after she began to grow close to Charles, a boy she met while performing in theater. Her brother, Tyler, learned of the abuse. He encouraged her to leave home, and to take the ACT in order to apply to Brigham Young University. Westover was admitted to BYU and given a scholarship. She and Shawn became close again after he stood up to their father on her behalf. When Shawn has a serious motorcycle accident, she takes him to the hospital.
Part two covers Westover's studies at BYU and her opportunity to study at King's College, Cambridge and receives financial awards that will allow her to remain there. She describes the stress she felt from the pressure of having to maintain her grades in order to keep her scholarship, as well as the issues she runs into due to her alienation from the outside world and lack of formal schooling.
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