Educated

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

Tara Westover was born in Idaho in 1986. She received her BA from Brigham Young University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014. Educated is her first book.

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.