I don’t think it’s a hot take to say that too many books are New York Times bestsellers. It’s so ubiquitous with book covers that I’m confused when I don’t see one. The only time I actually don’t see that line is when I’m looking at some random local shops. A book doesn’t even get into a bookstore like Barnes & Noble without being a bestseller already. Odd, right?

That being said, they need a new category for books like Educated. This book spent 132 weeks on the bestseller list. Almost 3 years. Along with receiving countless other accolades and awards.

If that amount of attention doesn’t convince you to read it, oh boy, wait until you hear the plot. 

Educated is Tara Westover’s memoir of having survived — and yes survive is the right word because it is astounding that she did — growing up as the seventh child of Mormon survivalist parents in the mountains of Utah. A place called Buck Peak.

She was born without a birth certificate and raised up “homeschooled” with a few absolute truths: the government was always about to invade and the End of Days was always at hand — both of these demanded constant preparation and attention; mainstream, Western medicine was not to be trusted and all formalized schooling was laughable. When we think of “homeschooled” education, it is most certainly not what Tara received.

I know that memoirs are a special genre and usually only those who already read often or those who know the writer would be interested. Let this be the one you try. It is genuinely hard to believe this story isn’t fiction. 

Tara spent her childhood busy preparing for a day that was always about to come. Her father, who claimed prophetic powers, never let them forget that, at any point, their entire lives could and would end. They were to be afraid at all times. Scared into action. 

In the summer, Tara would help her mother, a midwife and herbal healer, in whatever way she needed. In the winter, Tara salvaged metal in her father’s scrapyard, where, at 10 years old, she was not allowed to wear gloves or a hard hat because it would be a “hindrance” and slow her down. 

The rest of Tara’s life begins when her older brother Tyler tells the family he’ll be going to college — institutions that their father articulated are run by agents of the Illuminati, even at the Mormon school, Brigham Young University, where Tyler would be attending. Tara’s furious that Tyler’s leaving, that he’s leaving her specifically, and that the family is shrinking. 

As time goes on, the emotion shifts from anger to Tara becoming more and more curious as she sees her older siblings experience the world in ways she can’t. They’re old enough to get jobs, old enough to drive, but mostly, they’re old enough to learn, to experience. Tara only experiences what her parents explicitly allow and want her to.

Because life never gets easier at home, because the dangers stop being vague, abstract, looming threats of the end of the world and start being erratic, violent brothers or a father desperate to maintain control and belief, when Tyler comes home on a school break and advises Tara to apply for college and get away from home, she takes him up on it. 

This decision on Tara’s part surmounts to a rejection not just of her parent’s beliefs but of them entirely. The decision to receive an education, to work at one, means more than just receiving information. Tara isn’t just curious, she’s certain that she doesn’t have all the information to live in the world, that her parents kept something important from her. 

Readers also have a vague sense of this but the extent of it is none the more visceral and shocking than when she raises her hand in class to ask about a word she’s never heard before: Holocaust. 

Education, in the story, is not simply knowledge of the world but a decision to be a part of it. Tara is all too aware of how easy it would be to step away from society, to reject the gruesome, brutal, cruelty that humanity is capable of. She chooses not to. 

Something I don’t think many people would be capable of, Tara actually kept her eyes on the world she had so much to learn about so steadily that she went all the way to get a PhD in Intellectual History from Cambridge. For most of us, awareness is exhausting. It hurts to know about the pain and suffering of the world. Tara took it as her responsibility to know what is going on and be a part of the conversation in making it better.

What shocked me more than anything was that in all Tara experienced, all that she learned, she remained empathetic. She looks past what was happening right in front of her to see the root of why it happened at all. 

She takes a father who was abusive, blatantly misogynistic, who disregarded the safety of his children, behaved with religious psychosis, and generally traumatized the entire Westover family, and she sees the tragedy of an undiagnosed mental illness. 

She takes her brother Shawn, her main abuser who terrorizes her teen and college years, and while she decides it’s best that he’s not in her life, she also knows that many of the experiences of their childhood — the many severe injuries Shawn received — cannot be ignored in the man he became. The father’s pain inflicts pain on his son. 

The end of the book puts into sharp focus that this is the real life of the real woman telling her story because it doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. The family hasn’t recovered, in fact it’s more fractured than ever. But Tara isn’t angry anymore. 

She wishes her family the best, wishes they’d see her side more, wishes they could see that her leaving was never to hurt them. In the gift that this book is, the magnificence that is Tara’s writing, the reader comes to understand that everyone is a victim in some way, even if those victims had victims of their own, to the life they had in Buck Peak.