Educated

A childhood on Buck's Peak

Educated is Tara Westover's memoir of growing up in a survivalist family in the mountains of Idaho, then leaving to earn a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. She never set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen. The book is about what education does to a person: it opens the world, and it can also split you from the people who raised you.

Westover is the youngest of seven children. The family lives at the foot of a mountain she calls Buck's Peak. Her father runs a junkyard, salvaging scrap metal, and builds barns and hay sheds. He holds extreme views. He distrusts the government, public schools and doctors. He expects the end of the world and prepares for it by storing fuel, food and guns. He speaks often about the standoff at Ruby Ridge, where federal agents besieged a family in Idaho, as proof of what the government will do.

The book's family names are mostly pseudonyms. Westover calls her father Gene and her mother Faye. Her father's beliefs shape every part of the children's lives. Several of the younger children, including Tara, have no birth certificate for years. Their "homeschooling" is mostly work in the junkyard and in the kitchen. There are few books apart from scripture and some old texts.

The children do get some glimpses of another life. Westover's grandmother, who lives down the hill and whom she calls Grandma-down-the-hill, disapproves of her son's views. At one point she offers to take Tara away so she can go to school. Tara is tempted but does not go. She chooses to stay with her family, a choice that shows how strong the pull of home is for a child who knows nothing else.

Westover's father shows patterns that she later learns to describe. In a psychology class at college she reads about bipolar disorder and recognizes her father's swings between grand certainty and dark withdrawal. She is careful to say this is her interpretation, not a diagnosis.

Faith, herbs and the cost of refusing care

Her mother is an herbalist and becomes a midwife. She makes tinctures and salves, and the family uses them instead of hospitals. This choice has serious consequences. Westover describes a long series of injuries that her family treats at home.

On a long night drive, the family car crashes, and her mother suffers a head injury. She never fully recovers. She has headaches, sensitivity to light and memory problems for years. Later, her brother Luke's leg is badly burned in a fire in the junkyard, and her mother treats it with herbs. In the worst accident, her father is caught in an explosion while working near a car's gas tank. He suffers severe burns over much of his body. The family keeps him at home and treats him with salves. He survives, but with deep scars and lasting damage.

Westover herself is hurt in the junkyard more than once. She describes her father's work methods as reckless. He tosses heavy metal into bins while the children are inside them. He expects God to protect them. When injuries happen, he sees them as tests of faith or as signs that the injured person was not careful enough.

In late 1999 her father prepares for Y2K, the computer problem he believes will bring civilization down at midnight on New Year's Eve. When nothing happens, Westover sees him crushed. It is one of the first times she sees his certainty fail.

Part One: Shawn and the first exit

The most frightening figure in the book is her older brother, whom she calls Shawn. He is charming one moment and violent the next. He gives her cruel nicknames, twists her wrists and forces her head into a toilet. He controls her by mixing affection with abuse. After a fall on a job site injures his head, his violence seems to grow worse.

Westover's response for years is to blame herself. She believes she provoked him. She also learns that her parents will not protect her. They doubt her, minimize what happened, or say she is exaggerating. She shows how a child in an abusive home can begin to distrust her own memory.

Her way out begins with her brother Tyler. He leaves home for college and urges her to do the same. She also performs in local musical theater, where she meets people outside her family's world. She also works part-time jobs in town. These small freedoms show her that she can be someone other than the girl in the junkyard. She meets a young man named Charles through theater, and his ordinary kindness makes her see how unusual her home life is. She is embarrassed to bring him close to her family, and the friendship does not survive the gap between their worlds. With Tyler's encouragement she teaches herself algebra and grammar from used textbooks and studies for the ACT, the college entrance exam. On her second attempt she scores high enough to win admission to Brigham Young University (BYU).

Her father sees college as a betrayal. He tells her that universities are tools of the government and that she is walking into a trap. Her mother is more torn. She has quietly wanted more for her children, but she rarely stands against her husband. Westover leaves for BYU with little money and almost no idea what to expect.

Part Two: Learning what she did not know

At BYU she discovers how much she does not know. In an art history class, she reads the word Holocaust and asks what it means. The room goes quiet. She does not know about the Holocaust, the civil rights movement or many other basic facts of history. She also struggles with daily norms: washing hands, how to talk to roommates and how to take notes.

She learns to study. A history professor sees her talent and encourages her to apply to a study abroad program at the University of Cambridge. There, a professor tells her that one of her essays is among the best he has read. She later wins a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, completes a master's degree, spends time as a visiting fellow at Harvard and earns a PhD in history from Cambridge.

This part of the book also covers the slow change in how she thinks. She learns about the historical debate over whose stories get told. She sees that history is written by people with their own perspectives. This idea applies to her own life. She starts to question the version of her childhood that her father told her.

She also feels torn. Each trip home pulls her back into her old role. She works in the junkyard again, defers to her father, and tolerates Shawn's behavior. Then she returns to university and feels like a fraud there too. She describes living as two people who do not fit together.

Part Three: The break with her family

As Westover changes, the family tightens around its own story. She tells her parents about Shawn's abuse. Her sister Audrey first backs her up and shares that Shawn also abused her. Later, under pressure, Audrey takes her support back. Her parents side with Shawn.

Her father offers her a priesthood blessing, a religious ritual meant to cast out the evil he believes has entered her. Accepting it would mean admitting that her memories are false and that her education has corrupted her. She refuses. This choice leads to estrangement from her parents and several siblings.

The cost is high. She has a breakdown at Cambridge. She cannot work for long periods and struggles with sleep and shame. She gets counseling and slowly recovers. She finishes her doctorate.

The family divides along a clear line. The siblings who left the mountain and pursued education, including Tyler and Westover herself, stay apart from their parents. The siblings who stayed remain close to them and depend on the family's businesses. Her mother's herbal oil business grows into a successful company, which binds the family together further.

Memory and the self

Westover handles memory with care. She uses footnotes to show where her account differs from a sibling's memory of the same event. For example, she notes when her brothers remember an injury differently. This method shows how memory can be unreliable, and it models a kind of honesty about doubt.

She ends with a reflection on what education gave her. It was not only facts. It was the ability to think for herself and to accept that she can see the world through eyes other than her father's. She calls the change a new self. She admits some people will call it a betrayal. She calls it an education.

What the critics say

Some of Westover's family members dispute parts of her account, and her parents have said through a lawyer and online posts that the book misrepresents them. Some readers also question whether a memoir built on memory can be fully reliable, a point Westover addresses openly with her footnotes.

Who should read it

Read it if you are interested in how people break free from closed worlds, or if you have had to choose between family loyalty and your own truth. It also suits anyone who believes education is about more than credentials.