Book Club Monday: Educated

Author: Tara Westover Title: Educated Publisher: Random House Date Published: 02/20/2018

Read Dates: 01/06/2025- 01/12/2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This was my book club pick for January.

Educated is a very moving memoir of Tara Westover, an author and essayist who grew up on a mountain in Idaho. Her family was led by a deeply religious and often paranoid father, who believed that public education and the medical system were part of a flawed government system out to get them. As a result, Tara received no formal education until she took the ACT at 16, lied on her college application about rigorous homeschooling and stepped foot on a university campus.

This was a very well written and thought provoking memoir. It made me curious to know the story of some of her siblings, as three of the children went on to get PhD’s while the other four never got a high school education. Definitely recommend this for people who enjoy nonfiction/memoirs!

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard.

Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.