Educated by Tara Westover: Summary, Review and Quotes

Educated is the unforgettable, thought-provoking memoir of a woman’s formal and informal education growing up as the daughter of a fanatical, survivalist father.  It’s the type of book that leaves the reader yearning for so much more even years after reading it, and it is definitely one of the best books set in school as well as one of my top suggestions for book clubs.

This post shares an Educated by Tara Westover summary and review with quotes to guide your reading experience.

Educated is a #1 New York Times bestseller that was one of my favorite non-fiction books of all time.

It’s downright fascinating, whether you believe the many hyperbolic tales within it or not.  That’s a loaded sentence, isn’t it?  Below is my Educated by Tara Westover summary:

The book is a memoir (which works as a great audiobook memoir) by a woman who was raised in the mountains of Idaho as a member of a survivalist Mormon family. Her mother was a midwife and natural healer, and her father ran a junkyard. In his free time, he was a religious fanatic preparing to survive an apocalypse. 

They didn’t believe in doctors or hospitals, and they barely conducted homeschooling.  Tara didn’t even have a birth certificate.  Tara’s version of events was that, more or less, she began educating herself as a teen, and she first stepped foot into a classroom as a college student at Brigham Young University.  She later studied at Harvard.  In one of the most memorable scenes in the book, she asks what the Holocaust was during class.  

There were so many hard-to-believe tales in this book that they were, well, somewhat unbelievable.  There were times in which Tara even admitted her family remembered these tales differently and so, the reader was left trusting an unreliable narrator.

That being said, Tara did not come across as a liar to me — she seemed to just remember what she remembered, how she remembered it.  And there was so much trauma in this book, from surviving the family’s survival of horrifying accidents and injuries to Tara and her siblings falling prey to an abusive older brother, that I wondered how PTSD may have affected what was remembered — and perhaps even not remembered –in the writing of this story.  

I viewed Tara and her siblings as victims of abuse at the hands of a mentally ill father. I saw much of Educated the same way, and Tara did delve into how mental illness may have played a role in her upbringing.

That being said, it seemed to me that Tara had to have received a better childhood education than she let on.  I found it hard to believe she picked up calculus on her own as a teenager and breezed right into a well-respected institution and, later, one of the most well-respected institutions in the world. 

And every time she was miserably failing a class, she somehow miraculously finished with an “A.”  I had a hard time reconciling that aspect of this memoir. 

I also couldn’t figure out whether modern amenities like cars and telephones and computers were forbidden in the family.  They seemed to appear without a struggle from her fanatical father throughout the book.

As Tara grew up and left the confines of her home, she was torn between choosing her family and finding herself, which could not co-exist.

Of note, Educated did not seem to aim to disparage the Mormon religion, and I personally did not take that away from this book or form any such negative opinions from reading it.

No matter your opinion on what’s “true,” Educated is guaranteed to make you think and leave you gasping.  Educated is, quite simply, difficult to read and impossible to put down.