Julia Whelan

Tara Westover

A Memoir

Educated

Tara Westover was seventeen 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 metal in her father’s junkyard.

Her father distrusted the medical establishment, 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 an older brother became violent.

When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. There, she studied psychology, politics, philosophy, and history, learning for the first time about pivotal 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 University. 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 from severing one’s closest 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.

angie

Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness. 

“ It has never occurred to you," he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone." 

It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.

Linda

Clara Rosenfeld

Lane Hokanson

Anum Memon

I very much love this book. It can change your perspective, and I'm glad my sister recommended this. I have to say if you are going to this book it handles very dark topics so please search for trigger warnings. Her whole family dynamic in this book is gas light central.

Lord Aragorn

A difficult book to read but at the same time, hard to put down. At various points, the book made me sad, angry, incredulous, and ultimately hopeful that the author can heal.

Wie Bildung mir die Welt erschloss

Befreit

Susanna P.

"Es ist merkwürdig, wie viel Macht über dich du Menschen gibt, die du liebst." 


Westover schreibt über sich. Manchmal selbst staunend. Dann wieder fassungs¬los. Schonungslos ehrlich. Sie erlebte Missbrauch, Angst, Manipulation. Ich sah dieses kleine Mädchen vor mir, dass nie zur Schule gegangen war. Auch zu Hause wurde sie nicht unterrichtet. Ihr Leben war vorbestimmt. Sie würde einmal Mutter und Hausfrau. Bis dahin half sie dem Vater auf dem Schrottplatz, der Mama mit ihren Kräutern. Bis zu dem Moment, wo ihre innere Stimme immer lauter und unüberhörbar wurde. Sie wusste nun, dass allein Bildung sie aus ihrem familiären Gefängnis befreien konnte. Der Preis dafür, war hoch. Ihre Geschichte ist ein Geschenk, durchbricht das Schweigen. Ihre Sprache 
ist brillant. Sie schreibt flüssig, bildhaft, facettenreich.

Matthew Royal

** spoiler alert **
           A powerful synthesis of one woman's escape from a toxic, reality-distorting tribal faith. I think anyone who has had the way they understand the world destroyed and transformed will find pieces of themselves in Tara's story. This is one I need to reread every year, as a reminder.

Alexa M

Wow. I have NEVER read a memoir that felt so much like a fictionalized story before. Tara’s story is incredible, disturbing, raw, and important. Everyone should pick this up!!!

Meghan Navoy

I loved this book. It's a memoir but read like fiction and was very captivating. A moving and complicated story of a woman who managed to escape abusive upbringing but not without emotional scars.

Thomas DeCelle

Amazing insights into the struggle of becoming educated.

Zoe Stricker

Annabella

Nick Gracilla

A disturbing memoir of growing up isolated in an uneducated, extremist, gun toting survivalist family in Idaho. “Homeschooled” here meant none at all, in a family that eschews modern medicine, the Government, birth certificates, education, basic safety or seatbelts. Not a chapter goes by without major fights, accidents, abuse, or physical and emotional violence. Despite it, the author struggles and succeeds to remake herself, frankly improbably with advanced degrees from Cambridge and Harvard. Recommended with reservations, especially to anyone who thought they had it tough growing up.

Ivy X

What an interesting memoir. I was fascinated by a family structure driven by religion and paranoia @ the government/healthcare/anything mainstream (including education). It was both terrifying, raw, and emotional all at once. Westover does an amazing job at looking into her past, taking into account numerous perspectives and varying takes on certain life events. She also manages to paint her family as something both foreign and isolating yet also a piece of her. 

It was shocking to read about how their family handled illnesses, pain, and even big issues such as concussions/severe burns/etc with essential oils and "connecting with the lord." To put oneself through pain and ignorance (for lack of better words) because of faith made me question why a god that required pain and isolation was worth believing in. Likewise, I thought it was particularly interesting the way the family shielded themselves from numerous traumatizing incidents by brushing it off or believing it was fiction (such as the violence Tara experienced from her brother). 

Westover does a great job at adding in the human touch needed for readers to understand their lives and their perspectives (despite having completely different lived experiences). For instance, when she went to BYU and learned of bipolar disorder, she tied the associations to mental health to her father and her brother. For me, it suddenly made more sense where that heightened paranoia her father and brother had come from and why they sometimes felt warm/familial and other times cold and unfeeling. However, Tara does not excuse their actions (even pointing out the continuation of abuse her brother once projected on to her to his wife; the irrational isolation her parents subjected her to and the lack of trust from those who are supposed to be closest to her). 

Would recommend. Good book.

Vishwa

Well written in that I was engaged all the way through, and man, what a life Tara Westover has had. Shocking. Ending was weaker than I had anticipated, but hey, it's her life.

Jeannette Ordas

Whoa Nelly! This was a good read memoir of growing up in a really difficult family and coming out triumphant. Reminded me a lot of Jeannette Walls' memoir, The Glass Castle so if you're familiar you can image what you're in for. Still, I found that this gave me nightmares so I didn't read it before bed like I usually do. Highly recommended.

Arturo Hernández

It had been a while since a book didn’t make me feel so many emotions, so quickly and with such profound implications.

EDUCATED narrates the life of Tara Westover, a then 16 year old girl that suffered extreme abuse at the hands of her father, some of her brothers and even her mother. The complicated part of the book is that throughout most of her life (even when she eventually went to Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard) a part of her always thought her family’s religious beliefs were right and she was, no matter what she did or thought, always wrong in the end.

The emotions this book carries are quite strong. There is disbelief, anxiety, pain, stress, trauma, confusion and more. At times it’s a quite bizarre psychological trip that just leaves you dumbfounded as to how there can be so different realities for people that share so many aspects of their lives.

Ana Paula

Amazing, I have no words. I can't begin to imagine what it must have been to gather the courage to write this and to stay strong in this journey. 
This book, as cheesy as it may sound, shows that change is possible and that you can truly achieve anything you set your mind to.

Kavana Anklekar 

Goodreads Choice 2018 winner, Educated by Tara Westover had been on my TBR for a long time, and I finally got around to reading it. Dubbed by Bill Gates, “as the kind of book everyone will enjoy,” it surely makes for a fascinating read.

Tara Westover was born to a Mormon family in rural Idaho. Her father, to put it mildly, had some ‘unconventional beliefs’ which greatly shaped the eccentric reality of his family. He prepared for the end of the world, believed schools and hospitals were institutions run by the Illuminati and considered himself a custodian of the true will of God. These beliefs weren’t conspiracies he floated at dinner table conversations, rather, he believed them with such vigor, that the first time Tara stepped into a classroom was when she turned 17 and for much of her childhood, she had no medical records, not even a birth certificate.

Tara’s story is incredible in many ways. It is a story so unbelievable, many have gone as far as doubting its credibility. From a girl working in her father’s junkyard, for whom words like “Holocaust” and “Napolean” made no sense, she goes on to study history at Brigham Young University, bagging a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and receiving her MPhil and Ph.D. in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge. From the Tara of Buck’s peak, she transforms into Dr. Westover. Yet, the real transformation that takes place is much deeper, messier, and painful than can be captured in titles.

Educated is enormously inspiring in the leaps taken by Tara to educate herself. In the words of Gates, “I thought I was pretty good at teaching myself- until I read Tara Westover’s memoir Educated. Her ability to learn on her own blows mine right out of the water.”

Sunday Times calls it “Joyous” while the Literary Review calls it “Heartbreaking”, and both these adjectives stand to be true. It is joyous in Tara’s journey of finding her voice, breaking away from shackles of her old life, and triumphing in the pursuit of education. Yet it is heartbreaking in the multiple instances of physical and psychological abuse, in the many horrific accounts of accidents & crises, and the feeling of not fitting in and never being enough. And most importantly, Tara’s pressing need to sever ties with her family as the only means of escape.

The book also raised many questions for me.

What does it truly mean to be educated? What lengths could one’s beliefs drive them to? How do you cut yourself off from the only people you have ever known and loved? How far-reaching can be the effects of one man’s disorder on his entire family?

There are a few more questions, particularly those relating to the storyline, that have been left unanswered. As many point out, the story lacks closure, and perhaps it was too early to write a memoir. But each time I think of this, I am pulled back to what Tara says at the very end:

“We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories. Nothing has revealed the truth to me more than writing this memoir- trying to pin down people I love on paper, to capture the whole meaning of them in a few words, which is of course impossible. This is the best I can do: to tell the other story next to the one I remember. Of a summer day, a fire, the scent of charred flesh, and a father helping his son down the mountain.”

A few thoughts I had while reading/ Big Takeaways:

On Cause and Effect
Not a single outcome is ever caused by a single action, or the result of one individual’s efforts, choices, or decisions. So many factors, most invisible, finally shape our reality. It is almost impossible to ever properly establish a cause-effect relationship, especially in the matters of a person’s life.

On Abuse
Trauma and abuse can be so damaging, kindness starts to taste like poison.

On Endurance
Endurance is a tricky thing. If Tara lacked it, she would have never achieved her academic laurels. But if she had it in abundant measure, she wouldn’t have found the courage to step out of her past. She would have stuck with it, enduring the abuse without questioning. What is required, I presume, is endurance in the right measure and in the right place.

On Education
Education is the search for a unique voice. It is meant to empower.

Liz B

Absolutely fascinating, and the author is undoubtedly an incredibly strong person. I wish she had written this book 5 to 10 years later than she did, because I think some added distance from the events that the book portrays might have allowed for some more nuanced and deep reflection. By the end of the book, it very much felt like you were reading about something that the author is still currently experiencing and working through, which I think she is/was. Totally understand that, but from a memoir perspective it felt a little too close.

Tara Westover was seventeen 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 metal in her father's junkyard. Her father distrusted the medical establishment, 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 an older brother became violent. When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. There, she studied psychology, politics, philosophy, and history, learning for the first time about pivotal 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 University. 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 from severing one's closest 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.

It was pretty good. Gave me a lot of different perspective and made me think. Especially the one about the father being maybe misogynistic is maybe caused for the longing of his own mother. Basically saying motherless behavior <3 it’s not horrible guys. I just… don’t know how to give really give good reviews

Leann!

Landon Alder

I could not put this down! It was so gripping. It shares a lot of parallels with Ruth Wariner’s book, The Sound of Gravel.

Lizzy Jensen

Sanjay Krishna 

Belle

This book is kind of like a car crash: horrifying yet enthralling. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Norma gruden

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies

Educated A Memoir

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