PDF Summary:Educated, by Tara Westover

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• Physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her older brother, Shawn—and her parents’ refusal to intervene to protect her.

Tara’s ultimate escape from this world and her intellectual awakening as a scholar are to be celebrated. But Educated is far more than a story about overcoming adversity or rising up from poverty (though it is certainly those things too).

It is a story about learning how to think for oneself. For most of her life, Tara was told what to believe, mostly by her father. There was little room for dissent or debate. These commands were given extra weight because her father imbued them with the awesome power of religious authority: he was speaking for God.

Tara’s ultimate defiance of her family was a revolutionary act of self-liberation. Not just because she went to college, not just because she accepted the legitimacy of going to the doctor, and not just because she came to reject the lies and propaganda that had informed her view of history and society.

Fundamentally, her revolutionary act was to use her own sense and intellect to illuminate her view of the world, **to accept herself as an autonomous human being with the right to make...

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He was an apocalyptic prophet, believing that the family was living at a time close to the end of the world, or as he called the era, the “Days of Abomination.” In his fevered end-times scenario, Gene believed that the government and the basic structure of society would collapse, paper currency would become worthless, and everything would descend into anarchy and chaos. To prepare the family for what he saw as an inevitability, Gene insisted on stockpiling supplies of homemade canned goods, clothing, gold, and, most disturbingly, high quantities of military-grade weaponry.

His faith also made him an avowed opponent of public school, and in fact, all forms of education other than homeschooling. Indeed, he believed that public school was a government conspiracy to indoctrinate children and lure them from the righteous path of God.

He had come to this belief around the time he was thirty, before Tara was born. At this time, he had pulled her older brothers—Tony, Shawn, Tyler, and Luke—out of school. The children born after this decision—Audrey, Richard, and Tara—never had the chance to attend school at all, having come into the world after Gene had undergone...

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The Crash

The family would take annual trips to visit Gene’s parents during the winter months, when the latter would snowbird in Arizona. This was usually to combat Gene’s intense bouts of depression, which would set over him during the harsh winters on the mountain in Idaho. He would take to bed and refuse to emerge from his room for days at a time.

Faye explained this away by likening Gene to a sunflower: he’d wither and die in the snow, so he needed to be replanted in the sun. Looking back, Tara now sees that this was a symptom of her father’s mental illness—but, like so many other things in her childhood, she accepted her mother’s rationalizations for the family’s need to uproot itself and cater to Gene’s needs.

While the family was in Arizona, Gene would assail Tara’s grandmother with his unorthodox views. When he found out that she was going to see the doctor, he informed her that herbalism (as practiced by Faye) was a sacred calling, one which used God’s own bounty on earth to cure sickness. He contrasted this with the godless, unnatural, and dangerous practices of modern medicine.

He claimed that “doctors and pills” were Grandma’s gods, and that she...

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In a sequence that would come to be repeated many times over the years, Faye ultimately yielded to Gene and took his side in the dispute, where she had previously been supportive of Tara.

But Faye still sought another outlet for her youngest daughter. She subsequently enrolled Tara in voice classes, which she paid for with her earnings from her homeopathy practice. Tara did well and eventually became good enough to start singing in church. Her performance met with praise from many of the Westovers’ friends and acquaintances in the congregation.

Gene, surprisingly, was beaming with pride, telling everyone how blessed the family was to have someone with talent like Tara’s. Looking back, Tara notes that her father seemed to let go of his paranoia and anger when he heard her sing. For those brief moments, he was transported—and transformed.

Tara landed the leading role in a local production of Annie when she was 13. Going to the auditions and rehearsals opened Tara’s eyes to a new world and a new community of people who were different—people who weren’t preparing for the end of the world.

This contrast appeared especially stark as the year 2000 approached, and...

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A Shocking Knowledge Gap

In a Western art class, she learned of another massive gap in her knowledge about the world. She’d volunteered to read a section of their book during a class discussion, but she stumbled on a particular word, asking innocently, “I don’t know this word. What does it mean?”

The professor rolled his eyes and said, “Thanks for that,” while the rest of the class sat in silence. They thought she’d been joking. Afterward, a classmate told her that she shouldn’t make jokes like that, and that what they had been discussing wasn’t funny. But Tara hadn’t been joking. She was deadly serious about never having encountered this word before.

Only later that day, when she looked it up online, did she come to understand the full gravity of this word she’d never heard before: “Holocaust.” As she learned more, she was horrified by several things all at once—the barbarity of the event itself, the sheer power of man’s inhumanity to man, and her own ignorance for having never heard of it. Later, Tara would discover that anti-Semitism was a core component of her father’s conspiratorial worldview. He believed that a cabal of Jewish bankers had conspired to...

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She only needed $1,400 for the dental operation. She instead received a check for $4,000. The money had the opposite effect of what Gene had said. The money didn’t control her. It liberated her, giving her convictions actual weight. Now she really could honor her promise to herself to never again work for her father.

Bipolar Disorder

With her financial situation more secure, Tara was able to pour herself more vigorously into academics. She had a revelation in a psychology course while listening to a professor list the symptoms of bipolar disorder: depression, mania, paranoia, euphoria, delusions of grandeur, and persecution complexes. The professor was describing her father.

Later, the class discussed the role that mental illness had played in separatist movements and anti-government conflicts, as had happened in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Tara had never heard of Ruby Ridge, but when she looked it up, she saw that it was the site of the standoff between Randy Weaver and the federal government in 1992. These were the same Weavers whom Gene had labeled as fellow “freedom fighters” to Tara, the Weavers of the supposed massacre at the hands of ruthless government...

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She embarked on new cultural experiences that she never could have enjoyed before, including drinking red wine for the first time and travelling to Rome. She was in awe of the ancient city, and captivated by the interplay of buildings from antiquity with the modern infrastructure that surrounded her. She saw that she and her friends debating philosophy by the Trevi Foundation or discussing literature in the shadow of the Colosseum gave life to the ancient capital: they did not treat it as a dead relic, but instead made it the live background of their intellectual experience.

She began to embrace feminism, a word that had been a vile smear in the Westover home.

Tara immersed herself in the writings of second-wave feminists like Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Simone de Beauvoir. Reading these authors, Tara discovered that centuries of repression by the patriarchy had obscured the true extent of women’s capabilities.

At home, her womanhood had been stigmatized as a source of weakness or as something that needed to be guarded by the males in her life. Her sexuality was something to be repressed and her thoughts were castigated as being less worthy than those of men....

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This had obvious personal resonance for her. She loved her family, but she also knew she had a moral and social duty to stand against their racist, conspiratorial beliefs and their violent, abusive practices.

An Unexpected Visit

While she was in Harvard, Gene and Faye abruptly declared that they would be visiting Tara in Boston. She now believes that they were coming to save her, to offer her one final chance at redemption before they would have no choice but to cast her out forever.

While they were in the Northeast, Gene insisted that Tara accompany them on a visit to Palmyra, New York, where, according to the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, the Angel Moroni first appeared and commanded him to found the true church. It is among the holiest sites in the Mormon faith. Gene believed that touching the cross on the temple grounds would cleanse and heal Tara’s troubled soul.

Tara recalls the feeling of wanting to believe, wanting to be cleansed, wanting to be accepted back into the arms of the family she’d once known. But she simply couldn’t do it. When she put her hand on the cross, she felt nothing but cold, lifeless rock.

Later, when they returned to...