Educated

Tara Westover grows up on Buck's Peak, Idaho, the youngest child of survivalist Mormon parents who reject hospitals, public schooling, and government interference on principle; her mother homeschools her erratically and treats herbal remedies as an alternative to real medicine, even after serious injuries. Westover spends her childhood working in her father's scrapyard rather than in any classroom, and endures years of escalating physical and psychological abuse from an older brother, Shawn, that the rest of the family either minimizes or denies outright. Encouraged by another brother, Tyler, who left home himself and went to college, seventeen year old Westover teaches herself enough to pass the ACT and win admission to Brigham Young University, despite having never formally attended school. Culturally out of step with her classmates and financially precarious, she nonetheless earns a place, with a professor's help, on a study abroad program at Cambridge, and later wins a prestigious Gates Scholarship to continue there as a graduate student. Her academic success does nothing to resolve her family's dysfunction: her sister Audrey reveals that Shawn's abuse has continued into his own marriage, and Westover herself encounters him holding a bloody knife on one visit home, while her mother refuses to confirm either daughter's account of what happened. Attending Harvard as a visiting fellow only sharpens the split between her old life and her new one, and after repeated panic attacks she eventually cuts off contact with her parents and brother for roughly a year to hold herself together, before finishing her doctorate in history. The book closes at her maternal grandmother's funeral, where a partial, careful reconciliation with some of her family, though never with Shawn or her parents in full, becomes the price Westover accepts for keeping the self she built entirely on her own.

Westover tells her own story in plain, exact chronological order, letting the widening gap between what she was taught to believe and what she comes to understand through education do the emotional work rather than any single dramatic reveal; it reads intimately and often painfully, and its central tension, whether an education that estranges you from your family is worth what it costs, is never resolved into anything as simple as regret or triumph.