Tara Westover recounts her upbringing in a survivalist Mormon family in the mountains of Idaho. Kept out of the healthcare and education systems, she spent her childhood scavenging in her father’s junkyard and preparing for the end of the world. Her father’s bipolar disorder and her brother’s physical abuse created a volatile domestic environment. At seventeen, Westover taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to pass the ACT, eventually securing admission to Brigham Young University and later earning a PhD from Cambridge University.
Readers interested in the conflict between fundamentalist isolation and modern secularism will find a detailed account of ideological estrangement. The narrative serves those studying the psychological impacts of domestic violence and the cognitive dissonance required to leave a closed community. Readers walk away with a specific understanding of how academic literacy functions as a mechanism for individual autonomy, even when that independence results in the permanent loss of family ties and childhood belonging.
Insights from Educated
“I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.”
Being smart doesn't save you from being traumatized. Tara was at Cambridge and still felt like the girl with the dirty fingernails hiding in the library.
“I had never heard of the word.”
Going to college without knowing what the Holocaust was is a terrifying thought. It shows how much power parents have to keep their kids in the dark.
Shawn is a monster. There is no other way to put it. The way he used that bathroom floor to break her spirit stayed with me for weeks.
“Everything I had written happened. I knew this because I had written it.”
Your family can convince you that your own memories are lies. Tara literally had to write her way back to the truth while her mother enabled the gaslighting.
- Published
- 2018
- Language
- EN
