Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

Review by Mrs. O'Dell

This memoir was not at all what I expected it to be.  The cover of the book, at first glance a giant red, sharpened pencil, gives the impression that the topic is about school, maybe opinions of public education.  And although the author details her educational path, this memoir is much more about abuse, neglect, violence, brainwashing, and mental health than the author’s rise from all of it (through her education). 

Tara Westover was born into a Mormon family in the mountains of Idaho.  She had six brothers and sisters.  Her father was obsessed with preparing for the End of Days: digging a cellar in a hill and stocking it with canned peaches, storing a huge gasoline tank underground, and stocking up on guns and ammunition.  He put his kids to work scrapping in his junkyard, a dangerous task for anyone, let alone small children.  Tara’s father taught her that doctors and medicine were sinful, education was sinful, and a woman’s place was in the home.  She thought she was homeschooled, but her mother’s version of homeschooling was handing out textbooks and sending her kids to their rooms for an hour.  Tara flipped through fifty pages of a math book, then report back to her mother that she had done fifty pages of math.  The truth was she had no idea what she was looking at.  When Tara reported that she wanted to go to school, her father convinced her that the Lord would provide and there was no need for school.  So, Tara spent her days helping her mom with her herbal remedies and her father in the junkyard.  It wasn’t until one of her brothers, Shawn, became super verbally and physically abusive that Tara made the decision to leave the mountain life.  She taught herself math and took the ACT, without any schooling, and earned a high enough score to get into BYU. 

She was very much a fish out of water at BYU.  Tara struggled in her first semester, socially and in class.  She didn’t know history.  She had never even heard of the Holocaust.  Through determination and hard work, Tara fought her way through poverty and being an underdog student.  But a life altering lecture in psychology opened her eyes to mental health disorders, including pi-polar disorder and schizophrenia.  She started to understand her father. 

Educated is the true story of Tara Westover’s internal conflict between her father’s anti-main-streamed, anti-government, “head for the hills” lifestyle and her own ideas and perspectives.  The problem was that her father would not allow her to have her own opinions; if she didn’t agree with him, then she was cut-off from the family.  You will have to read for yourself how things turn bout for Tara. 

-Five stars! Two-thumbs up! A must-read for any human who seeks a greater knowledge!