Tara Westover

The New York Times ranked Educated as one of the 10 Best Books of 2018. Westover was chosen by Time as one of the 100 most influential people of 2019.

Tara Westover studied at Trinity College, Brigham Young University and University of Cambridge. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is history and literature. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are memoir. Works named in the authority record are Educated. Distinctions recorded are National Humanities Medal.

• Name — Tara Westover • Born — 27 September 1986 • Birthplace — Clifton, Idaho, U.S. • Occupation — * Historian • writer • Language — English • Education — * Brigham Young University (BA) • University of Cambridge (MA, PhD) • Notable Works — Educated • Website — tarawestover.com

Westover was the youngest of seven children born in Clifton, Idaho, (population 259), to Mormon survivalist parents, whom she pseudonymously refers to as Gene and Faye. She has five older brothers and an older sister. Her parents were suspicious of doctors, hospitals, public schools, and the federal government. Westover was born at home, delivered by a midwife, and was never taken to see a doctor or nurse. She was not registered for a birth certificate until she was nine years old. Her father resisted getting formal medical treatment for any of the family. Even when seriously injured, the children were treated only by their mother, who had studied herbalism and other methods of alternative healing. All of the siblings were loosely homeschooled by their mother. Westover has said an older brother taught her to read, and she studied the scriptures of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She never attended a lecture, wrote an essay, or took an exam. There were few textbooks in her house. As a teenager, Westover began to want to enter the larger world and attend college. She purchased textbooks and studied independently in order to score well on the ACT, following the suggestion of Tyler, one of her older brothers. She gained admission to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and was awarded a scholarship, although she had no high school diploma. After a difficult first year, in which Westover struggled to adjust to academia and the wider society at university, she became more successful and graduated with honors in 2008. Next, she earned a master's degree from the University of Cambridge at Trinity College in Cambridge, England as a Gates Cambridge scholar, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2010. She returned to Trinity College earning a doctorate degree in intellectual history in 2014. Her thesis is entitled "The Family, Morality and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890". In 2009, while a graduate student at Cambridge, Westover told her parents that for many years (since age 15), she had been physically and psychologically abused by an older brother, Travis (Referred to as Shawn in Educated). Her parents denied her account and suggested that Westover was under the influence of Satan. The family split over the events. Westover wrote about the estrangement, and her unusual path to and through university education in her acclaimed 2018 memoir, Educated.

Westover was an A. M. Rosenthal Writer in Residence at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School in the fall of 2019. She was then selected as a senior research fellow at the school for the spring of 2020. Westover has written for The New York Times and BBC News.

In 2018, Penguin Random House published Westover's memoir Educated, which recounts the story of her struggle to reconcile her desire for education and autonomy with her family's rigid ideology and isolated life. The coming-of-age story was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, and was positively reviewed by the New York Times, The Atlantic, USA Today, Vogue, and The Economist among others. As of 2020 February, Educated in hardcover had spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into 45 languages. The book was voted the No. 1 Library Reads pick by American librarians and in August 2019, it had been checked out more frequently than any other book through all of New York Public Library's 88 branches. As of December 2020, Educated has sold more than 8 million copies. Through their attorney, the family has disputed some elements of Westover's book, including her suggestion that her father may have bipolar disorder and that her mother may have suffered a brain injury which resulted in reduced motor skills.

Westover lives in Brooklyn, New York.