Educated Summary

Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, follows her journey from rural Idaho to the PhD program at Cambridge University as she struggles against her family’s devout, isolationist religious beliefs and fights for an education, learning along the way that to be educated is to learn much more about the world than what’s contained in books. Growing up at the foot of a mountain called Buck’s Peak in a rural Idaho county, Tara’s life was ruled by her domineering father, Gene—a charismatic but paranoid and delusional man who believed that the U.S. government was poisoning and corrupting its citizens through Godless education, Satanic medical practices, and surveillance methods designed to strip every citizen of their freedom. Adopting a self-sufficient, survivalist lifestyle, Gene put his children to work at a young age in his scrap yard and hoarded supplies for the “Days of Abomination,” which he always believed were just around the corner. As a result of Gene’s isolating his family and denying them medical assistance in emergencies or education in anything other than the Bible and the ways of life on the harsh mountain, the Westover family suffered many terrible and debilitating accidents. Tara’s mother, Faye, suffered brain damage during a car accident which was never treated. As a result, she developed intense migraines, memory loss, and turned to her own delusions for comfort—she believed that through a finger motion called “muscle testing,” she could determine whether one was sick or well and divine complicated questions straight from God himself. Faye began an essential oil business which would soon take off not just locally but nationally, and provide the family with enormous sums of money that would all be used in continual preparation for the End of Days.

As a young girl, Tara worked in her father’s scrap yard but dreamed of living a normal life like the other children she met in town. She took music lessons and dance classes, but when Gene pulled her out of dance after deeming the recital costumes “whorish” (long, knee-length sweatshirts specially chosen so that Tara could participate), Tara turned to singing and theater. She met several friends through her community theater participation, such as Charles, her first crush, and even spent time bonding with her older brother Shawn, who also had an interest in taking part in plays and hanging out downtown. As Shawn grew older, however, he began stalking and harassing the girls he met and dated through the theater, and soon turned his violence on Tara. Shawn always insisted that the violent physical and emotional assaults against Tara were fun and games, and the pattern of abuse and reconciliation between them spiraled out of control for many years. When Shawn suffered a series of accidents during construction work which left him with permanent brain damage, Tara blamed his escalating violence and shortening temper on his suffering—but began to realize that the only way to escape her claustrophobic and dangerous family would be to go to college. With the encouragement of her brother Tyler, who’d already left home and studied hard enough to gain admission to college, Tara studied for the ACT, applied to the prestigious Mormon institution Brigham Young University, and was accepted—despite never having set foot in a classroom in her life.

At BYU, Tara was overwhelmed by the “gentiles”—secular people or casual Mormons—all around her, and intimidated by her classmates. During an early lecture, when a professor mentioned the term “Holocaust,” Tara raised her hand to ask what the word meant. When her classmates responded in disgust, Tara looked up the term herself on a library computer—faced with the destruction, violence, and grief of the Holocaust and her own ignorance of the genocide, she realized how little she truly knew about the world around her. Tara struggled through her first several years of college to reconcile her expanding worldview and increasing skepticism of Mormonism with the continual pull to return home to her family.

Through her visits during summers and holidays, Tara is subjected to the violence and humiliation of Shawn’s assaults, her father’s nonsensical tirades, and her mother’s cool indifference. The emotional tug-of-war she plays with her family throughout the years makes her emotionally withdrawn and physically ill, but with the help of her new friends, church community, and professors, she realizes that she must make her own choices and take charge of her own fate. When Tara’s father is terribly burned during an accident on the mountain—an accident which echoes a burn injury Tara’s brother Luke suffered many years earlier—she sees for the first time the cyclical and nonsensical suffering and violence her family continually puts themselves through in the name of their twisted beliefs.

When Tara is offered the opportunity to apply to a study abroad program at the prestigious Cambridge University, she accepts it—though she’s fearful of what it will mean to put an ocean between herself and her family. In Cambridge, Tara feels insecure and unworthy—but her professors, impressed by her sponge-like brain and mystified by her lack of an educational background, eagerly support and encourage her to believe in herself. After returning to America, Tara continues to question her place in the Mormon faith—and within her own family. Confronted with the knowledge that her parents’ backwards beliefs, terrible racism, and nonsense conspiracy theories will never change, she applies to study at Cambridge University in pursuit of a PhD. There, she continues to expand her consciousness and learn how to make choices for herself—she receives vaccinations and immunizations after twenty-something years of being uninoculated, and studies feminism for the first time in her life.

With each trip home to Buck’s Peak for Christmas or a holiday, she witnesses Shawn’s violence against his young wife Emily, Gene and Faye’s immersion in their booming oil business (which Tara knows to be built on fraud and delusion) and her sister Audrey’s silent suffering—Audrey was abused by Shawn, too. Tara and Audrey discuss joining forces to finally share the truth of their lives with their family, but as communications break down, loyalties shift, and Audrey is faced with the threat of being disowned, she clams up and cuts herself off from Tara, leaving Tara standing alone against her family. After Shawn tells Tara that he wants to kill Audrey for speaking badly about him, Tara confronts her parents at last—but they demand proof, and when Tara is unable to show any, calls Shawn over to hash things out. Shawn brandishes a bloody knife and threatens Tara with it—she escapes to the bathroom and admonishes herself for having tried to stand up to Shawn at all. She recants all of her claims against him and returns to Cambridge, where she begins suffering night terrors, anxiety, and depression. Shawn calls to threaten her, promising to send “assassins” to England to take care of her, and again Tara’s parents fail to defend her when she tells them what’s going on, even claiming that Shawn is “justified” in his attempts to defend his family against Tara’s hate and slander. As Tara begins to spiral, questioning her own memories and her own sanity in the face of her family’s gaslighting and manipulation, she accepts a fellowship at Harvard—but can hardly enjoy the accomplishment.

Tara’s parents come to visit her at Harvard and attempt to “reconvert” her. Dad offers Tara his blessing, and says that if she takes back everything she’s said and done to tear the family apart, she can come home, welcomed back into the fold. Tara denies her father’s offer, but after her parents leave and her own mental state continues to decline, she books a trip home to Idaho, desperate to reconnect. When she arrives, she finds emails on Mother’s computer which denounce Tara to members of their county and community as a liar and a fraud, and knows that she is not truly welcome. She leaves abruptly, promising to return but knowing she may never see her parents again. Back at Cambridge, her tenure at Harvard finished, Tara flails and risks failing her PhD. She holes up in her room and watches television, rejecting her friends’ and professors’ attempts to get through to her. When Tara’s brother Tyler sends her an email stating that he has heard what’s going on and supports her unequivocally—and is denouncing and severing himself from their parents—Tara feels a burst of support and joy, and finds the strength to begin attending counseling and finish her PhD. After her degree is conferred and she moves to London with her steadfast boyfriend Drew, Tara is proud and truly happy for the first time in a long time—but knows she needs to make one final trip to Buck’s Peak to reclaim her own history.

In Buck’s Peak for her grandmother’s funeral, Tara connects with her mother’s estranged sisters and finds solace in their love and support. At church, she sees her entire family gathered together—but most of them barely even glance her way. Tara sits with her siblings Tyler and Richard—the three of them, the ones who have chosen to pursue an education, are on the opposite side of a vast chasm from the rest of the Westover clan. In the book’s final pages, Tara admits that she still often feels unworthy of her education, or like an impostor for choosing to pursue one—she fears she’ll always be the little girl in men’s jeans working the scrap yard up on Buck’s Peak. At the same time, she has found refuge in the understanding that education is a lifelong process—and her education has been the acceptance of transformation, betrayal, and metamorphosis as painful but inevitable parts of any human life.