📚 Book🎭 Teens · Ages 14–17Non-Fiction / Biography

Educated (2018)

About This Book

Tara Westover grew up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho, never attending school, working in her father's junkyard, and enduring injuries that went untreated because her parents distrusted hospitals. Through sheer will and the help of a few key people, she taught herself enough to pass the ACT, enter Brigham Young University, and eventually earn a PhD from Cambridge. Her memoir reads like a novel you cannot put down, except everything in it actually happened.

Why It's a Classic

Westover's memoir is remarkable for the honesty with which she depicts her own complicity in her family's belief system, showing how deeply internalized ideology can be even when it is obviously destructive from the outside. She does not write about her family as villains; her father's paranoia is depicted with a complexity that allows readers to see how charisma, religious conviction, and mental illness can fuse into something both loving and dangerous. The book's structural achievement is in making the reader feel the protagonist's disorientation as education forces her to question everything she was raised to believe, a process that is exhilarating and painful in equal measure. Westover writes with the precision of a trained historian, and her account of the gap between her family's version of events and documented reality raises profound questions about memory and truth. The book spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the best books of the decade by multiple publications.

Fun Fact

Westover did not set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen years old, and she had never heard of the Holocaust or the Civil Rights movement before entering college. Her admission to Cambridge was facilitated by a professor who recognized her raw intellectual ability despite her unconventional background. Several of Westover's family members have publicly disputed her account of events, which adds an unintentional layer to the book's themes about the subjective nature of memory.

Parent Note

The memoir describes physical and emotional abuse by a family member, serious workplace injuries involving fire and machinery, and the psychological manipulation of a vulnerable young woman by her family. Westover's brother's violence escalates throughout the book and is described in disturbing detail. The depictions of untreated injuries, including burns and a head wound, are visceral. There is no sexual content. It is appropriate for teens 14 and up, and it can be especially powerful for teens navigating their own questions about family loyalty and intellectual independence.