Tara Westover

Tara Westover is an American historian and memoirist whose debut Educated recounts her extraordinary journey from an isolated survivalist childhood to a Cambridge PhD.

Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a family that distrusted government, medicine, and formal education to a degree that most readers will find extraordinary. Her father believed the End of Days was imminent and stockpiled for it; her mother worked as a midwife and herbalist outside the medical system; and Tara and her siblings were never enrolled in school, instead working in the family’s junkyard and preparing for a catastrophe that never came. Educated, published in 2018, tells the story of how she eventually left, taught herself enough to sit the ACT, gained entry to Brigham Young University, and went on to earn a PhD from Cambridge — all while navigating a family that could not accommodate her transformation.

The book is riveting and beautifully written, and Westover is honest about the uncertainty of her own memories — she acknowledges that her recollections of abuse and danger are disputed by family members and that her own mind has processed the past imperfectly. This honesty about the instability of memory gives the book a depth that more confident memoirs lack. She does not position herself as a simple triumph-of-the-individual story; she is aware of what she lost as well as what she gained, and the grief of her estrangement from family runs through the book alongside the liberation.

Educated is one of the most remarkable memoirs of the past decade — a book about education, self-creation, and the cost of leaving a world behind that transcends genre.