Tara Westover's Journey: From Isolated Upbringing to Academic Excellence
Tara Westover is an American author and historian whose memoir, Educated, chronicles her extraordinary journey from a childhood devoid of formal education to earning a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Her story is one of resilience, intellectual curiosity, and the transformative power of education.
A Childhood in Rural Idaho
Born in 1986, Tara Westover was the youngest of seven children in a strict Mormon family residing in rural Idaho. Her parents, deeply distrustful of public institutions, opposed public education and modern medicine. As a result, Westover never set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen. Four of her parents' seven children didn't have birth certificates. The family lived in isolation on Buck's Peak, where her father ran a scrapyard and her mother practiced herbalism and midwifery.
Westover's father, Gene, was paranoid about hospitals, public education, and the government, partly due to the siege at Ruby Ridge. He worried that the government would force them to go to school, believing that public education was a kind of brainwashing institution. He had very strong Second Amendment beliefs, and he thought that the right to bear arms was the best safeguard against a tyrannical government in general. He prepared for the end of the world or a government invasion through food preparation, canning, water, fuel, Morse code, mirrors, walkie-talkies, and radio-type things.
Her mother, Faye, homeschooled the children, but as time went on, she had seven children, was very much looking after the house and the farm, was doing herbalism, and then she became a midwife. The homeschooling had kind of fallen by the wayside. Tara never took an exam or wrote an essay for her mother that she read. It was a lot more kind of if you wanted to read a book, you could, but you certainly weren't going to be made to do that.
The children spent their days working in the family's junkyard, a place Westover initially found to be a wonderful playground. However, as she grew older, it became a place where they worked, which could be pretty terrifying because her father just didn't have that bone in his head that said, this is dangerous; don't do this. They were injured a lot in the junkyard. Her brother once lit his leg on fire, and after when the fire was finally out, his leg was covered in third-degree burns. The family chose not to take him to the hospital but to treat that at home with a salve her mother made of comfrey and lobelia.
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The Spark of Education
Despite the lack of formal schooling, Westover's older brother, Tyler, pursued higher education, eventually earning a doctorate. Tyler is the first to go to college, and he encourages Westover to take the ACT so she can apply and go, too. His example inspired Westover to seek her own education. At seventeen, she decided to leave her father's junkyard and enroll in a university.
With no diploma or formal training, Westover faced significant challenges. She failed a lot and was awkward. Eventually, it got easier, and the world began to open up. She started learning about all the things that, because she had been kept out of school, she had never heard of before: the holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement, Debussy and Degas, photosynthesis and tectonic motion.
Academic Pursuits and Achievements
Westover's determination led her to graduate magna cum laude from Brigham Young University (BYU) in 2008. After her acceptance, Tara Westover studies at Brigham Young University and receives scholarships allowing her to continue attending. The pressure of maintaining her grades in order to keep her scholarship results in Westover feeling stressed. Additionally, her alienation from the outside world and lack of formal schooling become issues.
She then received a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge in England. After arriving at King's College in Cambridge, Tara Westover is assigned to work with Professor Jonathan Steinberg. Both of her professors encourage her to attend graduate school. Tara Westover applies for and wins the Gates Scholarship and forms a temporary truce with Gene. In 2014, she earned a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge. She never did get her high school diploma, but in 2014, she left Cambridge with a PhD.
In 2019, Westover was the Rosenthal Writer in Residence at Harvard University. In 2023, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden.
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Educated: A Memoir of Transformation
In 2018, Westover published her memoir, Educated, which recounts her journey from isolation to academic success. The book explores her struggle to reconcile her desire for education and autonomy with her desire to be loyal to her family. In the memoir, Westover is explicit about the reality that she has to rely on memories and conflicting accounts about events that occurred a long time ago. Because her family was so isolated and avoided contact with public services at all costs, there are almost no official records for Westover to use to confirm what she remembers. Westover uses pseudonyms for many of the characters in her memoir, including both of her parents and many of her siblings.
Educated was an instant commercial and critical success, debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and remaining on the list for more than two years. It was also a finalist for several national awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times named Educated one of the 10 Best Books of 2018, and the American Booksellers Association voted it the Nonfiction Book of the Year. In its first three years in print, over 8 million copies of the book were sold.
The memoir received many positive reviews as well as numerous awards. Many critics and readers have praised Westover's honesty and vulnerability in revealing both the abuse she suffered, and the sense of loss she experienced as she gradually cut ties with her family.
Westover's experience studying, exploring history, and gaining a wider perspective of the world prompted her to question some of the beliefs she grew up with, and realize that many things about her childhood had been unhealthy and damaging. In 2009, while at work on her graduate studies, Westover confronted her parents about the abuse she had been suffering for years at the hands of her brother. Their denial finally prompted Westover to sever ties with them.
Themes and Interpretations
Educated explores several themes, including the power of education, the importance of self-discovery, and the challenges of reconciling family loyalty with personal growth. Westover's story highlights the transformative potential of education to broaden one's perspective and challenge deeply held beliefs.
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The memoir also delves into the complexities of family relationships, particularly when those relationships are marked by abuse and ideological differences. Westover's journey involves grappling with the tension between what she owed to her family and what she owed to herself. She said that she set out to explore the complexity of difficult family relationships.
Westover attempts to reject interpretations which would present her memoir as fueled primarily by a critique of Mormonism, and shows compassion toward the childhood she experienced. The memoir also begins with a note in which Westover states, “This story is not about Mormonism. Neither is it about any other form of religious belief.”
An attorney has made statements on behalf of Westover's parents, claiming that the memoir misrepresents the quality of education Westover received while homeschooled, and the severity of the injuries which were treated at home rather than in medical settings.
Estrangement and Reconciliation
One of the most poignant aspects of Westover's story is her estrangement from her family. As she pursued her education and developed her own worldview, she found herself increasingly at odds with her parents and some of her siblings. Westover was also losing her family. They were unable to accept the person she had become, and she was unable to accept some of the old patterns that had defined her childhood, violence, fundamentalism, threats.
After she confronted her parents about her brother's abuse, and the resulting conflict led to her becoming estranged from some members of her family, she began searching for stories to help her understand what had happened. In 2018, she told The New York Times, "I wrote the book I wished I could have given to myself when I was losing my family. When I was going through that experience, I became aware of how important stories are in telling us how to live-how we should feel, when we should feel proud, when we should feel ashamed. I was losing my family, and it seemed to me that there were no stories for that-no stories about what to do when loyalty to your family was somehow in conflict with loyalty to yourself… forgiveness. I wanted a story about forgiveness that did not conflate forgiveness with reconciliation, or did not treat reconciliation as the highest form of forgiveness. In my life, I knew the two might always be separate."
Years later, Westover returned to Idaho for her maternal grandmother's funeral. She reunites with Tyler, his wife, two maternal aunts, and her other siblings, most of whom still take Gene's and Shawn's side.
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