PDF Summary:Educated, by Tara Westover

Educated: A Memoir is Tara Westover’s autobiography. In it, she shows us her transformation from being the daughter of survivalist, fundamentalist, anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-education parents, to becoming a Cambridge-educated historian. Westover summons the strength to break free from the ideological chains of her youth and discovers the agency to make her own choices about how she sees and experiences the world.

While it’s about one individual’s journey, Educated speaks to universal themes of self-liberation, the power of education, the perils of extreme ideology, and the trauma of domestic abuse.

(continued)...

One day, Tara was stabbed in the leg by a piece of iron, then nearly crushed to death by a load that her father was dumping from the forklift. Gene was barely concerned with Tara’s safety and was more upset that she’d lose a working day due to her injury. On another occasion, her older brother Luke accidentally set his legs on fire while draining gasoline from old cars. As no one was home, Tara had to treat his burns by wrapping her brother’s legs in garbage bags and placing them in water. Throughout, she was traumatized by Luke’s screams of agony.

By the time she was 11, Tara knew she wanted to get away from the junkyard. Following her older sister’s lead, she decided to get a job as a babysitter. Since she didn’t go to school, she was always available and soon filled her calendar with work. Her babysitting jobs gave her a feeling of accomplishment and her first taste of autonomy. They also exposed her to the outside world, first through dance classes (which Gene put a stop to) and later, singing lessons. At 13, Tara landed the lead role in a local production of Annie. Going to the auditions and rehearsals opened her eyes to a whole community who lived freer lives than her family.

Teen Years Marked by Abuse

Tara recalls her body changing at this time as she reached sexual maturity. Thus, she began to feel the weight of her family’s highly patriarchal and often misogynistic views on women, marriage, and sexuality. Gene became obsessed with the alleged indecency of women in the community, and family dinners were marked by his rants against them. However, Gene wasn’t the only source of repression in the household. Tara’s older brother Shawn began to shame her for alleged acts of impropriety, calling her a “whore” for wearing makeup and talking to boys.

Shawn was physically abusive as well. On several occasions, he beat her, dragged her by her hair, stuck her face in the toilet, and even broke her wrist, toes, and ankles. Tara was tormented by the abuse and manipulated into believing that it had been her fault. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tara’s parents turned a blind eye to Shawn’s violence and refused their daughter’s requests to intervene and protect her. Nevertheless, Tara’s feelings toward Shawn were complicated. On the one hand, he was a violent abuser, and on the other hand, she enjoyed a special bond with him. Shawn was the only family member who’d stand up to Gene on her behalf, though he was as controlling and abusive as his father.

Preparing to Leave

By the time she was 16, Tara could see that she was unsafe living in her home. She knew that if she didn’t get out soon, she’d never get out. She’d just settle into the same pattern as her mother: Marry, have children, and learn midwifery. Instead, she yearned for a life that would let her explore her full potential. In this, she received encouragement from Tyler, who suggested she enroll at Brigham Young University. The school had a history of accepting homeschooled students, and all she would need to do was pass the standardized ACT test. However, when she bought an ACT study guide, she realized she was mathematically illiterate. To pass, she’d have to cram years of learning into a few short months.

Slowly, painstakingly, she made progress, but when the time came to take the test, her math, grammar, and science skills were still substandard. Because she’d be applying to BYU at 16 (two years before most kids go to college), she needed to earn a score of 27 on the test to be admitted. Thus, she not only needed to make up for missed education, she needed to do better than her peers. Tara scored a 22 on her first attempt, but she was heartened nonetheless: She’d scored better than she thought she could, given the odds against her. On her next attempt, she scored a 28, which got her accepted into college.

Higher Education

Life at college brought new opportunities, as well as new challenges for Tara. She began wriggling free from her family’s dogma, but was constantly reminded of how profound an effect Buck’s Peak had on her. Her roommates wore clothes that her father would have decried as frivolous and indecent, and they appeared to lead highly secular lives. She and they quickly clashed over issues of cleanliness and personal hygiene, which had been discouraged in her family growing up. Thus, at first, Tara thought nothing of leaving moldy food in the refrigerator or only showering once a week.

As a student, Tara learned how deep her ignorance ran. In one class discussion, she inadvertently revealed that she’d never heard of the Holocaust. In an art history course, she didn’t know she had to actually read her textbook instead of merely looking at the pictures. But she was able to learn from her early missteps and make up ground. She also began to shed the ideological baggage of her father’s beliefs by wearing normal clothing, going to the doctor when she got sick, and seeing her womanhood as something to be celebrated, rather than scorned and repressed.

Tara did better and better as she became more accustomed to university life and discovered how to be a student. By the time the semester ended, she’d done well in courses on history, English, music theory, and Western civilization. She was confident she’d be able to qualify for a partial scholarship, which she desperately needed to remain in school.

Trouble at Home

Unfortunately, Tara wasn’t entirely free from Buck’s Peak. When she returned home for the summer, she was told she’d have to go back to work in the junkyard. She vividly recalls the sinking feeling that all her accomplishments and intellectual growth were negated by having to revert to her old way of life. Bit by bit, Tara was learning how abnormal her family life was and how absurd her father’s obsessions were.

Being home also meant that she was once again exposed to Shawn’s cruelty and abuse. He took to mocking her college education, labeling her “uppity” and worse. She continued her studies at school in the fall, but when she returned home to Buck’s Peak for Thanksgiving, Shawn physically assaulted her several times, strangling her and shoving her face into the toilet—in full view of her family. When she came back for Christmas a few weeks later, Shawn beat her in a public parking lot. Tara had long convinced herself that Shawn’s violence was her fault—that if she’d asked Shawn to stop in the right way, he would have. Now, however, she began to recognize what Shawn truly was and how her family condoned his abuse.

At BYU, it became clear to the university’s bishop that Tara was experiencing severe emotional trauma. Over the course of several meetings with him, she told him the truth about her brother. The bishop told her not to go home and that the church would help her get the funds she needed to remain in school and earn her degree. The bishop’s solution was for her to get a government grant, not a student loan she’d have to pay back. Her father had railed against government grants, and his beliefs still influenced her decisions to some degree, so she initially refused. Eventually, she saw the irrationality of her decision and agreed to apply for a grant. When the money arrived, she found it didn’t control her—it liberated her.

Revelations and Opportunities

With her financial situation more secure, Tara poured herself 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. Tara wrote a paper on the effects bipolar parents have on their children. Her research showed that such children are prone to develop mood disorders themselves, and that they suffer from the stressful environment their mentally ill parents create. She later confronted her father about this, and she didn’t return to Buck’s Peak that summer.

Instead, she committed herself to studying history and politics. Eventually, she did well enough to earn a place in a study abroad program at Cambridge University in England. While there, she impressed the professors who served as her advisors, with Professor Jonathan Steinberg calling her paper on 18th-century political philosophy one of the finest he’d ever seen by an undergraduate. He told her he’d make sure she was accepted into grad school, and that he’d take care of the fees. For the first time in her life, Tara started to believe she had the same right to a fulfilling and intellectually rich life as anyone else.

Self-Emancipation

Tara continued to excel as a student, liberating her mind from the ideological constraints of her upbringing. When her undergraduate work was done, Tara was accepted as a graduate student, and then a PhD candidate, at Cambridge. There, she studied concepts of liberty, which included having control over one’s mind, as well as freedom from irrationality, paranoia, and self-policing. She realized this kind of liberty had been denied her by her family, and the time had come to emancipate herself from “mental slavery.”

Tara began to embrace feminism, a word that had been treated as a smear at Buck’s Peak. In reading feminist 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, and her sexuality was something to be repressed. But if the true extent of women’s capabilities had been hidden throughout history, then Tara concluded that her potential was untapped and her possibilities were limitless.

As a PhD candidate, Tara had to produce an original piece of research to become a historian herself. She chose to bring her experience full circle by studying her family’s faith, Mormonism, as an intellectual movement, not simply a religious one. This included studying practices like polygamy as a social policy, not just a doctrine or a practice. Looking at her own religion in a scholarly and dispassionate way felt like an exercise in radical self-liberation—it was a final act of shedding the fundamentalism and dogma of her youth.

Losing Her Family

After submitting her final graduate paper, Tara returned to Idaho for a visit. At home, the cycle of abuse continued. Shawn had married and was abusive to his wife. Tara also learned that Shawn had abused her older sister, Audrey. Tara was now determined to bring the matter of Shawn’s abuse to their parents, but Gene and Faye refused to believe her and insisted that she was trying to destroy the family. Even Audrey herself recanted her story and joined the others in denouncing her. Tara fled, fearing that Shawn’s violence would turn against her and be deadly.

Ultimately, Tara was left with no choice but to break off contact with her family. She knew that she needed to sever her ties to their cycle of abuse, paranoia, and control. As an accomplished woman, she was now determined to step fully into her new life and use the power of her intellect to shape her own path. She saw that her education had been more than just the acquisition of fancy degrees or titles. It had been an act of revolution, self-emancipation, and liberation from the bonds of ignorance and control.