Educated Themes

“My strongest memory is not a memory,” begins Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated. Though the book is a carefully written history of Westover’s childhood of growing up in a family of Mormon fundamentalists, she admits outright that memory is tricky and subjective—and therefore, she argues, so is the history of one’s life and one’s family. Throughout the book, Westover argues that both personal memory and family history are subjective things, perceived differently by different…

Growing up the child of a Mormon fundamentalist with paranoid, extremist views—possibly exacerbated by bipolar disorder—Tara Westover was denied access to an education. Her father, Gene, believed that the American government used public schools to deliberately “brainwash” children, and refused to let his younger children attend school. Instead of receiving a formal education, Tara grew up studying the Bible, helping her mother mix and bless homemade herbal tinctures, and working alongside her older…

The stifling, claustrophobic home in which Tara Westover comes of age is marked by physical, emotional, and psychological abuse—an insidious triad that serves to entrap the members of the Westover clan, keep them vulnerable, and cause them to question whether what’s happening to them is really abuse after all, or just the normal way families treat one another. As Westover looks back on the ways in which she, her mother, and her siblings all…