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#1 NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, AND BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER • One of the most acclaimed books of our time: an unforgettable memoir about a young woman who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University

“Extraordinary . . . an act of courage and self-invention.”—The New York Times

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • BILL GATES’S HOLIDAY READING LIST • FINALIST: National Book Critics Circle’s Award In Autobiography and John Leonard Prize For Best First Book • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award • Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

“Beautiful and propulsive . . . Despite the singularity of [Westover’s] childhood, the questions her book poses are universal: How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”—Vogue

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, O: The Oprah Magazine, Time, NPR, Good Morning America, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, The Economist, Financial Times, Newsday, New York Post, theSkimm, Refinery29, Bloomberg, Self, Real Simple, Town & Country, Bustle, Paste, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, LibraryReads, Book Riot, Pamela Paul, KQED, New York Public Library

Review

“Westover has somehow managed not only to capture her unsurpassably exceptional upbringing, but to make her current situation seem not so exceptional at all, and resonant for many others.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Westover is a keen and honest guide to the difficulties of filial love, and to the enchantment of embracing a life of the mind.”—The New Yorker

“An amazing story, and truly inspiring. It’s even better than you’ve heard.”—Bill Gates

“Heart-wrenching . . . a beautiful testament to the power of education to open eyes and change lives.”—Amy Chua, The New York Times Book Review

“A coming-of-age memoir reminiscent of The Glass Castle.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Westover’s one-of-a-kind memoir is about the shaping of a mind. . . . In briskly paced prose, she evokes a childhood that completely defined her. Yet it was also, she gradually sensed, deforming her.”—The Atlantic

“Tara Westover is living proof that some people are flat-out, boots-always-laced-up indomitable. Her new book, Educated, is a heartbreaking, heartwarming, best-in-years memoir about striding beyond the limitations of birth and environment into a better life. . . . ★★★★ out of four.”—USA Today

“[Educated] left me speechless with wonder. [Westover’s] lyrical prose is mesmerizing, as is her personal story, growing up in a family in which girls were supposed to aspire only to become wives—and in which coveting an education was considered sinful. Her journey will surprise and inspire men and women alike.”—Refinery29

“Riveting . . . Westover brings readers deep into this world, a milieu usually hidden from outsiders. . . . Her story is remarkable, as each extreme anecdote described in tidy prose attests.”—The Economist

“A subtle, nuanced study of how dysfunction of any kind can be normalized even within the most conventional family structure, and of the damage such containment can do.”—Financial Times

“Whether narrating scenes of fury and violence or evoking rural landscapes or tortured self-analysis, Westover writes with uncommon intelligence and grace. . . . One of the most improbable and fascinating journeys I’ve read in recent years.”—Newsday

About the Author

Tara Westover is an American historian and memoirist. Her first book, Educated, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and remained on the list, in hardcover, for more than two years. The book, a memoir of her upbringing in rural Idaho, was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. To date it has been translated into more than forty-five languages. The New York Times named Educated one of the 10 Best Books of 2018, and the American Booksellers Association voted Educated the Nonfiction Book of the Year. For her staggering impact, Time named Westover one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2019. Westover holds a PhD in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 2019 she was the Rosenthal Writer in Residence at Harvard University. In 2023, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn. The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt. The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling. Down below, the valley is peaceful, undisturbed. Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver, bowing before every puff and pocket of air. Behind me a gentle hill slopes upward and stitches itself to the mountain base. If I look up, I can see the dark form of the Indian Princess.

The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind.

Turning toward our house on the hillside, I see movements of a different kind, tall shadows stiffly pushing through the currents. My brothers are awake, testing the weather. I imagine my mother at the stove, hovering over bran pancakes. I picture my father hunched by the back door, lacing his steel-toed boots and threading his callused hands into welding gloves. On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping.

I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.

Dad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse.* We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist.

Of course I did exist. I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.

There’s a story my father used to tell about the peak. She was a grand old thing, a cathedral of a mountain. The range had other mountains, taller, more imposing, but Buck’s Peak was the most finely crafted. Its base spanned a mile, its dark form swelling out of the earth and rising into a flawless spire. From a distance, you could see the impression of a woman’s body on the mountain face: her legs formed of huge ravines, her hair a spray of pines fanning over the northern ridge. Her stance was commanding, one leg thrust forward in a powerful movement, more stride than step.

My father called her the Indian Princess. She emerged each year when the snows began to melt, facing south, watching the buffalo return to the valley. Dad said the nomadic Indians had watched for her appearance as a sign of spring, a signal the mountain was thawing, winter was over, and it was time to come home.

All my father’s stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how I’d know when it was time to come home.

*Except for my sister Audrey, who broke both an arm and a leg when she was young. She was  taken to get a cast.

Review:

4.9 out of 5

97.14% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars Educated is worthy of its acclaim. Tara Westover is worthy of admiration.

F. · May 15, 2020

There are two types of popular books, one is the kind that gets a lot of hype and fanfare and sits on bestseller lists for months but ultimately falls short of all the acclaim. Second is the kind that simply lives up to your greatest expectations -- even if you were skeptical of all the aforementioned hype and fanfare to begin with. Educated is solidly, well written and exquisitely told story of survival and ultimately, success. I was skeptical because Educated stares at me from The New York Times, week after week on the bestseller list—everyone seems to have either heard of it, has read it or wants to read it. How can it be that good? Or is it just good, in the common mainstream way that some books are? But Tara Westover has written a powerful and heart-searing story about the abuse and dysfunction she experienced growing up with her wildly eccentric and religious family. Her upbringing is a far cry from what a normal childhood looks like; Tara never went to public schools and yet managed to study at Cambridge and complete her PHD at Harvard. Who wouldn’t want such a success story? But more on that in a moment.Tara Westover’s emotional story broke my heart even as she tells it in a very matter of fact style. She’s raw and honest about her own self and shortcomings, she turns the lens on herself many times in the book, shining a light on her own bad behaviors and choices. Her story is shocking, infuriating and at times just plain, disturbing, but I couldn’t stop reading it. I didn’t feel it was redundant at all, although you can say, many of the same bad things happen to her over and over again; car accidents, freak accidents in the junkyard, physical and verbal abuse from her older brother and worst of all, the sheer lack of protection she had from her parents. The hardest thing to grasp about Tara’s story is how easily her parents did not protect her from so much, time and time again. To come from all that and to be as articulate as she is and as grounded as she seems is astonishing. Just pull up an interview of Tara Westover talking to Oprah or Ellen DeGeneres and you’ll find yourself thinking what a lovely person she appears to be. She doesn’t seem fueled with anger or overcome with emotion, she holds herself upright gracefully and tells her truth, straight. She doesn’t even talk badly about all of the ones who have hurt her so deeply. I believe that is a testament to who Tara Westover is as a person.As far as her education, I read the many naysayer comments barking about her “too good to be true” Ivy League education and dismissing or denying how she could have not gone to public school and gotten a high school education before going off to these colleges based on what little education and home schooling she did have. I admit, it does sound too good to be true…but in some cases, some people just have what it takes; the talent, the brains, the drive and determination and the luck to get far in life. I think Tara always had it in her and the people who met her, the bishop and the professors who supported and encouraged her, felt very strongly about what Tara was capable of and I think they helped her as much as they could along the way. I think they wrote recommendation letters, persuaded her numerous times to apply for grants and funding and to take her knowledge as far as it could go. I think it was easy to see in Tara, a success story of sorts. She’s someone who transformed themselves into who she was meant to be, someone who could change her life (if not her story or her past) and transcend even her wildest dreams. I admire Tara and her success and applaud her for telling such a raw story—even if it meant risking estrangement from the people she loves.Tara Westover has written a brilliant story and proves what a good writer she is. A good story in the hands of a bad writer would not end up being as beloved and popular as Educated is. As far as I can see, she was meant to have all her success.

5.0 out of 5 stars Perceptive, Compelling, Articulate, Harrowing, and Inspiring

C.R. · May 12, 2018

Tara Westover is the youngest child of survivalist, fundamentalist, parents. It would be inaccurate to say that she was home-schooled since there was no effort at home to educate the children beyond teaching them to read. There was access to a very limited supply of books and most of the children were self-taught. The education provided by her parents was more an indoctrination into the father’s paranoid view of the world and his condemnation of any actions that did not conform to his rigid interpretation of Mormonism. Her story is harrowing, compelling, redemptive, and believable. It is so compelling and so fluently written that it was impossible to put down. This book was a selection for our book group and it lead to a very interesting discussion. The discussion covered the immediate topics of emotional abuse, physical abuse, mental health, religious extremism, political extremism, education, and families. Our discussion also covered more wide ranging issues such as how we are failing children who are removed from society, school, and view. We want to believe that parents should be able to love and care for their children without interference, but we know that not all parents will keep their children safe or provide what the children will need to fully function in this world. Tara deserved better, those children who were driven off a cliff deserved better, and there are thousands of invisible children who still deserve better. There are also very perceptive aspects of the book dealing with the role of women, and some scholarly discussion of the issue. Tara had to struggle to find her role as a woman after growing up in an environment where women are meant to be obedient and submissive. When she went to Brigham Young, she intended to study music so that she could lead a church choir. It sounded like an acceptable role for a woman to her. When her world opened, not only did she have no idea of her abilities, she began to reconsider her choices. At one point, she spoke with to a male student who was from a more mainstream Mormon family and applying to law school. She asked him if he would study law if he were a woman. He replied, “If I were a woman, I wouldn’t want to study it.” The conversation went downhill from there as he continued to insist that women are made differently and should only aspire to care for their children. Downhill again it went when he concluded that if he were a woman and wanted to study law, “I’d know something was wrong with me.” This thinking is not historic thinking, it was contemporaneous thinking. It was an enormous step for her to leave the mountain for the first time and she faced enormous objective challenges in both school work and personal behaviors. How heartbreaking is it that even after learning to succeed at the university, there were powerful forces at work to make her ”know her place” and stifle her basic right to be an adult in modern society? Fortunately, not everyone at the university shared that view of gender inequality and she received encouragement and sponsorship to go to Cambridge University. Tara Westover’s story is compelling. There are some who will read it and see elements of their lives and feel that they are not alone and perhaps encouraged that things can get better. Many of us will read it and wish that our parents were still alive so that we could call them and tell them thank you one more time for the loving, safe, environment that we took for granted. Her writing skills are extraordinary. She is an exceptionally perceptive person and she is able to express those perceptions in a way that helps the reader fully understand her thought processes. She is not just throwing out conclusions, indictments, or diagnoses. Her thoughts are worth reading, pondering, and remembering.

Great book.

J.W. · October 1, 2024

Well written and informative.

Touching and unforgettable

O. · August 16, 2024

A memoir written in the most honest way I have ever seen, touching and unforgettable. Thank you Tara, God bless you 🙏🏼

Sensível e forte

R. · February 20, 2024

A primeira frase já alerta para um livro extremamente bem escrito. Com o passar dos capítulos, o livro se expande. Além da escrita maravilhosa da autora, aprendemos sobre a sua vida: que história forre e comovente. Ao final, a admiração pela autora e sua coragem em escrever este livro dominaram, não queria parar de ler. Foi uma ótima dica que peguei por acaso na newsletter do Bill Gates.

Traumatic truths

K.C. · September 2, 2024

Written with clarity you feel so strongly for Tara. If only she could have escaped sooner. It must have been painstaking to unpick the traumas she endured to be able to live a something near-normal life. And to become a professor through all that adversity in her life and lack of schooling is truly remarkable. Chapeaux I believe is the way to congratulate the author. Thank you for sharing your life story with me.

Fight and determination

A.J. · September 1, 2024

It's not a feel good book and you probably won't feel better at the end either!The amazing tale of a little girl and her path/fight to get what she has!Read it !!!DET

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Educated: A Memoir

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