Educated

Given my new obsession with audiobooks, memoirs have been more appealing and readily accessible to me. I was moved to pick up Tara Westover’s Educated after years of outstanding reviews.

Tara relived her childhood and early adulthood, where she grew up in a strictly Mormon household. Her father, a Christian zealot, believed that the government was a sham and that the end of the world was around the corner. The Westovers spent their lives preparing for an apocalypse. Tara wasn’t allowed to go to school, had to completely cover her arms, legs, and torso, and was forced to work in her father’s junkyard. She didn’t even get a birth certificate until she was nine years old. Her parents believed in herbal remedies for all types of healing, claiming that doctors were out to kill you.

 Tara was sheltered to the point of ignorance, and she consistently dealt with physical abuse from her brother Shawn. Eventually Tara, like many curious children, began to question her parents’ logic and ask about the world around her.

Despite having never attended high school, Tara managed to pass the ACTs for a college acceptance. Though she was hopelessly behind her peers at Brigham Young University, her hard work earned her a master’s scholarship at Cambridge and a spot in a PHD program at Harvard.

Tara tells her path to becoming an intelligent critical thinker. As someone who loves college and learning, this novel certainly scratched an itch for me. The memoir also introduced me to the concept of Mormon survivalists.

Educated is a woman’s journey to understanding the realities of our world while breaking out of an environment of religious propaganda. This novel encourages the idea that anyone can achieve intellectual prowess regardless of background.