Educated

Educated is Tara Westover's memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in the mountains of Idaho, where her father was opposed to public education and modern medicine. She never set foot in a classroom until she was seventeen, spending her days working in her father's junkyard or assisting her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. Despite her non-traditional upbringing and lack of formal schooling, Tara pursued education, overcoming immense obstacles to earn a BA from Brigham Young University and eventually a PhD in history from Cambridge. The book chronicles her journey of transformation, navigating the conflicting pulls of family loyalty and her desire for knowledge, ultimately exploring the price of self-invention. It is a powerful story of resilience, identity, and the extraordinary lengths one woman went to in order to educate herself and forge a new life.