A short life of the author
Tara Westover (b. 27 September 1986) was born in Clifton, Idaho, the youngest of seven children in a family that operated outside conventional society. Her father, Val Westover, was a survivalist who ran a scrapyard and believed the federal government was an arm of the Illuminati preparing for the End of Days. The family did not use hospitals (her mother was an unlicensed midwife and herbalist), did not attend school (the children received no formal education), and did not have birth certificates — Westover’s own was not filed until she was nine. She never set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen years old.
Life and Career
Educated (2018) tells the story of Westover’s self-extraction from this world. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar from discarded textbooks to score a 28 on the ACT, enrolled at Brigham Young University at seventeen, and began the disorienting process of encountering the world — the Holocaust, the civil rights movement, basic European history — for the first time. She eventually earned a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and a PhD in history from Trinity College, Cambridge. Her doctoral research focused on the Cambridge Platonists and the collaborative project of knowledge.
The memoir’s emotional core is not the deprivation or the physical danger (though both are extreme: her brother Shawn’s escalating physical abuse, her father’s refusal of medical treatment even for severe burns and head injuries, the family’s hoarding of fuel and ammunition). It is the agonising psychological process of choosing education over family. To learn to think critically meant to recognise that her father’s worldview was delusional and her family’s behaviour was abusive — recognitions that her family experienced as betrayal. The book documents Westover’s repeated attempts to reconcile with her parents and siblings, and the eventual acceptance that reconciliation is impossible without surrendering the capacity for independent thought.
Educated sold over eight million copies, was translated into forty-six languages, and spent 223 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was recommended by Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey, and was shortlisted for numerous awards including the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
Themes
Westover writes about the conflict between loyalty and knowledge — what it costs to become educated when education means losing your family. The memoir is also implicitly about class and religion in rural America: the Westovers’ survivalism is not presented as insanity but as a coherent (if extreme) response to the anxieties of rural, working-class, religious Americans who feel abandoned by institutions. Westover’s refusal to mock or pathologise her parents — even as she documents their cruelty and delusion — gives the book its unusual moral complexity.
The memoir also raises questions about memory itself: Westover acknowledges in the text that her siblings remember events differently, and she includes footnotes correcting or qualifying her own recollections. This honesty about the instability of memory gives the book an epistemic dimension that most memoirs lack.
The Family’s Response
Publication of Educated fractured the Westover family further. Several siblings supported Tara’s account; others — including the brother she calls Shawn — denied her version of events. Her parents recorded a video disputing the memoir’s claims. The situation illustrates one of the book’s central themes: that the act of telling the truth about a family is experienced by the family as an act of violence. Westover has spoken about receiving death threats and about the guilt of having written a book that caused pain to people she still loves, even as she insists that the book’s account is truthful.
Critical Standing
Educated is the most commercially successful memoir since Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (2006) and arguably the most critically respected memoir of the 2010s. Its combination of extraordinary personal narrative, intellectual seriousness, and moral nuance has made it a fixture of book clubs, university syllabi, and cultural conversation. It belongs to the tradition of American memoirs about self-invention — alongside Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — in which education is both liberation and exile.
Westover has not published a second book. She has spoken publicly about the difficulty of writing after Educated — the exposure, the family’s response, and the challenge of following a phenomenon. The question of whether she will write again — and what she could possibly write about after so completely laying bare the formative experience of her life — remains open. Whatever follows, Educated has secured its place as one of the defining memoirs of the twenty-first century.
Collecting Westover
Educated (2018, Random House, New York) first editions bring $20–$60 in fine condition with the dust jacket. The enormous print run means copies are widely available, but true first printings (with the correct number line on the copyright page) are becoming more sought. Signed copies bring $50–$120.