I have just finished reading this book and wanted to review it while it was still fresh in my mind. As you’ll see below, the author writes extensively about memories – how real they are, whether they’re interpreted accurately, whether the same events appear the same to multiple people.

The ending of the story is largely given away by the dust jacket. You’ll read how a young woman who never attended any sort of schooling prior to taking a test that allowed her to enter Brigham Young University at the age of 17, received a doctoral degree from England’s Cambridge University, as well as a Fellowship at Harvard.

But that’s not the real point: The story of how she got from there to here is a staggering story of survival against tremendous barriers.

Westover writes in an extremely accessible way and her ability to explain her thoughts – or at least to examine them, since she doesn’t always understand them herself – is remarkable.

As background, Tara Westover was born in rural Idaho in 1986. She was the youngest in a large family of deeply religious Mormon survivalists. From birth, she was taught that everything about government and medicine were affronts to God’s plan. For a short while, her mother endeavored to home school Tara but something always got in the way and it was eventually dropped. This coincided with her mother’s ascension to being a highly sought-after midwife and the beginning of her mother’s business as a homeopathy practitioner and remedies producer, a business that is highly successful today.

[Today, her mother’s products are sold widely and profitably and for several years were marketed as the alternative to Obamacare. In an earlier time, we might have referred to what she sells as ‘snake oil’ – but this is not meant to suggest that I believe there is no value to homeopathic treatments. I use some myself, and swear by them.]

This was a very strict household, ruled with an iron fist by a father who Westover eventually learns has bipolar disorder – or at least that’s her learned assumption since there is no way he would ever go to a doctor for an assessment. Her mother is a little harder to pin down because she vacillates. Although she seems supportive of Tara sometimes, at others she seems downright cruel. And at ALL times, she defers to her husband. Because that is also part of God’s plan.

In this house we also meet a brother, Shawn, who cannot possibly be anything other than clinically insane. He probably has some of the bipolarism of the father, but he has as well an extremely aggressive streak of brutality and cruelty – none of which his parents see, or are prepared to confront. Over the years, his physical abuse of his sister Tara is the sort of thing that should have landed him in prison, if not in a psychiatric lockdown.

Westover’s narrative is based on her own memories and in many places throughout the book she is careful to point out that not everyone has the same recollections – even those who were involved in the same incidents. For instance, there is an accident where another brother is badly burned. His mother treats him – for what the narrative describes as extensive third degree burns – and he recovers. The story of that recovery is the catalyst that got her business started – she gains a reputation as someone sent by God to heal the sick. About the fire incident, there is little agreement with her family members about who was there when it occurred and what actions anyone took - about the only thing they can all agree on is that Luke was there because he has the burn scars to prove it.

There is a sort of Afterword entitled ‘A Note on the Text’ in which Westover discusses memories and how they differ depending on who’s doing the recalling. For most of her life, she has kept a journal (her mother did at least teach her how to read and write) but she is quite open to saying her journal entries are not entirely reliable. Even reading them some years after the events, she questions what she meant about some entries and whether what she wrote is really what happened or just what she thought happened at the time.


Westover doesn’t write this book to complain about her upbringing or about Mormonism. In fact, she is very respectful to the latter and, I would guess, is still a believer. Her purpose is to examine how one grows from the cradle of a very domineering household into a mature person – her own person, not the one that her family had always told her she had to be.

Throughout the book, Westover questions what she does, what she doesn’t do, what she might have done. She periodically slumps into what can only be called episodes of depression and it is not until she is working on her doctoral thesis that she finally seeks professional help – remember, she was raised to believe that medical people are instruments of the devil.

There is an episode in the book where a friend gives her an ibuprofen to ease the pain of an injury inflicted by her brutal brother – and she is more concerned about having taken this ‘poison’ – in broad defiance of her parents – than about the unremitting pain brought about by her brother’s beating.

A review in the Irish Times by novelist Anna Carey has this to say about Tara’s literary treatment of her family:

“Westover never demonizes him [Gene Westover, the father], or her mother, a midwife and herbalist who facilitated his delusions. She doesn’t even demonize her violent brother, whose behavior provided a further impetus to get away from her stifling environment. She recounts her experiences with a matter-of-fact lyricism that is extraordinarily evocative and which makes the emotional impact of the inevitable rift between herself and some members of her family even more powerful.”

What has been missed perhaps throughout the dialogue is not just the story of a bright and deeply courageous young woman escaping a lifetime of abuse, but rather a story of identity formation in the face of parental severe mental illness.

In Educated, Westover describes a deeply troubling childhood whose lasting impact simply cannot be denied. Whether the story is exaggerated or not, if even a quarter of what happened to her were true, it would still be deemed highly traumatic to say the least. The sheer number of times of witnessing burns, bloodied family members, and multiple car crashes is enough to give any individual PTSD.