Educated by Tara Westover
★★★★★ Highly recommended, one of the best books I’ve read this year
The remarkable story of a girl growing up isolated in rural Idaho, then escaping and finding her world expand as she gets an education. Educated is gripping, fascinating, and beautifully written.
Tara’s family is essentially a cult. Her father is a bipolar religious zealot who runs a junkyard. Her mother is an energy healer and herbalist. Their goal is to stockpile decades worth of food, gold, and guns buried in the yard, so they’ll be prepared for the end of days. They are conspiracy theorists, believing the “illuminati,” the “socialists,” or simply the government are out to get them, and they deprive their children of education, medical care, and other basic services. Their children have no birth certificates, never see a doctor or nurse, and never step in a classroom or read a book beyond religious texts. Tara’s parents are deeply neglectful, unable to remember their children’s ages within a few years and regularly putting their lives at risk. They turn a willful blind eye to the abuse she and her siblings suffer at the hands of her older brother.
Amid all this, somehow Tara teaches herself enough to take the ACT and get into BYU, which at 17 is the first school she ever attends. From there, Harvard and Cambridge and a PhD. The core of the story is the opening of her eyes as she learns about the world and begins to form a set of views distinct from those of her family. Her reality and that of her family are fundamentally incompatible. Making sense of this, and figuring out how to navigate a world where her obligations to family are set at odds with her responsibility to herself, is a long struggle.
Educated is a beautiful piece of writing. The story is well structured and unfolds naturally, carrying you along with it. The language is precise, never fussy or flowery, but also never stilted. Given the many years of trauma at issue here, it would be understandable for the book to drip with passion and emotion. But they don’t. While you can’t help but bristle with anger at the way Tara is treated, she never does. She seems at peace with it.
