Educated is the autobiographical story of Tara Westover’s journey from being the child of extreme anti-government, anti-science, and religious fundamentalist Mormon parents to becoming a Cambridge- and Harvard-educated PhD.
Born in her family’s isolated home in the mountains of Idaho, Tara was denied a proper education as a child. Her father, Gene, believed that public schools were a tool of the “socialist” U.S. government, meant to “brainwash” people. As such, he kept his children out of school and relegated them to a dubious homeschooling curriculum designed by his wife, Faye, who lacked any proper credentials for educating children. There were no tests or exams at Faye’s rudimentary school, and Tara mostly learned to read and write by studying the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon. Because of this, Tara had enormous gaps in her knowledge—she barely knew the basics of elementary math and was deeply ignorant on key historical facts about the U.S. and the world.
Her father was also deeply hostile to what he termed the “Medical Establishment,” believing that modern medicine was a plot cooked up by the government to poison people. A key part of his religious fundamentalism was his belief that God had provided all the medicine one would ever need in the form of natural herbs. He and his wife were committed to homeopathy, alternative medicine practiced in the home.
Faye believed herself to be a gifted healer, far more effective than any actual doctor (though she lacked any medical training). Thus, the family treated colds, sore throats, and even severe cuts, bruises, burns, and concussions with homemade concoctions of lobelia, skullcap, and eucalyptus. Hospital visits were simply out of the question. As Tara recalls, these remedies were almost never effective and they subjected her and her siblings to needless and easily-preventable suffering throughout their childhood.
When she was a teenager, Tara began to be abused by her older brother Shawn. On several occasions, he beat her, dragged her across rooms by her hair, stuck her face in the toilet, and even broke her wrist, toes, and ankles. Tara was tormented by the abuse and manipulated into believing that it had been her fault. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their patriarchal worldview and deeply anti-feminist beliefs regarding women’s sexuality and role in the home, Tara’s parents turned a blind eye to Shawn’s violence and refused their daughter’s requests to intervene and protect her.
By the time she was 16, Tara could see that she was unsafe living in her home. She knew that if she stayed, she would just settle into the same pattern of life her mother had: marrying a man, moving to a corner of the Westover property, giving birth to a large brood of children (Tara was one of seven), and learning homeopathy and midwifery herself. This did not appeal to her and she yearned for a life that would let her explore the full potential of her own mind.
With the encouragement of her older brother Tyler, who had already found an escape through education, Tara took the ACT and was accepted into Brigham Young University, despite having no formal education at all. As a student, Tara began to learn just how deep her ignorance ran. In one class discussion, she inadvertently revealed that she had never heard of the Holocaust. In an art history course, she didn’t know that she had to actually read her textbook instead of merely looking at the pictures. But she was able to learn from her early missteps, make up ground, and began earning Bs and As in her courses. She began to shed the ideological baggage of her father’s beliefs, wearing wearing normal clothing (which her father would have derided as “frivolous” or even “whorish”); going to the doctor when she got sick; and seeing her womanhood as something to be celebrated, rather than scorned and repressed.
Eventually, she did well enough to earn a place in a prestigious study abroad program at Cambridge University in England. Cambridge was unlike anything Tara had ever seen, with its medieval architecture and refined air of intellectual exploration and discovery. While there, she deeply impressed the seasoned and renowned scholars who served as her advisors, with one professor calling her term paper on 18th-century political philosophy one of the finest he’d ever seen written by an undergraduate. Later, Tara was accepted as a graduate student and then a PhD candidate at Cambridge and earned a coveted Visiting Fellowship at Harvard. She studied 18th- and 19th-century political thought and explored her own religion of Mormonism as an intellectual movement. Ten years after first setting foot at BYU, she defended her thesis and earned her PhD: she had become Dr. Westover.
While she was pursuing her graduate studies, Tara became aware that Shawn’s victims included more than just herself. She learned that sister Audrey, Shawn’s past girlfriends, and his wife had all been brutalized by her brother. Things came to a head one evening while Tara was visiting home, when Shawn threw his wife out of their trailer in the dead of winter and then proceeded to stab their dog to death in front of his young son. He then threatened to do the same to Tara. Tara was now determined to bring the long-buried matter of Shawn’s abuse to their parents. But, to her dismay, Gene and Faye refused to believe her and insisted that she was lying and trying to destroy the family. Even Audrey herself recanted her story and joined the rest of the family in discrediting and denouncing Tara.
Ultimately, Tara was left with no choice but to break off contact with her family. She knew that she needed to sever her ties with their cycle of abuse, paranoia, and control. As an accomplished woman, she was now determined to step fully into her new life and use the power of her intellect to shape her own path. She now saw that her education had been more than just the acquisition of fancy degrees or titles. It had been an act of revolution, of self-emancipation, and liberation from the bonds of ignorance and control.
Educated is an autobiographical journey. It takes us through Tara Westover’s struggles growing up in a survivalist household on a remote mountain in Idaho, and her eventual liberation from her family’s extreme ideology, religious fanaticism, and cycle of physical and emotional abuse. Eventually, Tara manages to matriculate at Brigham Young University, where she excels and goes on to a prestigious academic career that takes her to Cambridge and Harvard.
Her story exposes us to a community with which most readers wouldn’t be familiar: the world of extreme, anti-government, American survivalists among whom Tara grew up. Her childhood was marked by:
Tara’s ultimate escape from this world and her intellectual awakening as a scholar are to be celebrated. But Educated is far more than a story about overcoming adversity or rising up from poverty (though it is certainly those things too).
It is a story about learning how to think for oneself. For most of her life, Tara was told what to believe, mostly by her father. There was little room for dissent or debate. These commands were given extra weight because her father imbued them with the awesome power of religious authority: he was speaking for God.
Tara’s ultimate defiance of her family was a revolutionary act of self-liberation. Not just because she went to college, not just because she accepted the legitimacy of going to the doctor, and not just because she came to reject the lies and propaganda that had informed her view of history and society.
Fundamentally, her revolutionary act was to use her own sense and intellect to illuminate her view of the world, to accept herself as an autonomous human being with the right to make her own decisions about her life. Before this self-awakening, Tara had been told to disregard obvious truths that she could plainly see right in front of her. Now, she had learned to trust her own senses, know that she wasn’t crazy, and make independent judgments about reality.
Tara Westover was one of seven children born into a family of hardline, anti-government survivalists who lived on a remote mountain in rural Idaho. A Mormon fundamentalist, her father was an adherent (and active promoter) of an extreme ideology that welded together strands from the militia, anti-vaccination, and evangelical Christian movements.
His adherence to these views subjected his family to a number of privations.
The family lived at the base of Buck’s Peak, a mountain in Franklin County, Idaho. Her father, Gene, had free reign to impose his beliefs on the rest of the family from this remote, isolated location, free from interference (or intervention) from the outside world.
(Shortform note: Westover has changed the names of the principal characters in the book, since they are real people, many of whom vigorously contest the version of events that she presents. As the reader, we only know these individuals by the names she assigns to them.)
Gene’s family had been living on the mountain for over 50 years, but his own siblings had long since moved away by the time Tara was born in 1986. He had a contentious relationship with his own mother, whom Tara knew as “Grandma-down-the-hill” and who lived (as her nickname would suggest) just down the hill from Tara’s immediate family. She did not share her son’s hardline beliefs and frequently clashed with him over his refusal to send his children to school.
Gene was a religious fundamentalist, who believed that he could communicate directly with God and who took the text of the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon literally. He once forced the family to purge their refrigerator of dairy products and brought home 50 gallons of honey in his truck. He had done this because he had read in the Book of Isaiah, “Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.” He believed that God was telling him dairy was evil and honey was good.
He was an apocalyptic prophet, believing that the family was living at a time close to the end of the world, or as he called the era, the “Days of Abomination.” In his fevered end-times scenario, Gene believed that the government and the basic structure of society would collapse, paper currency would become worthless, and everything would descend into anarchy and chaos. To prepare the family for what he saw as an inevitability, Gene insisted on stockpiling supplies of homemade canned goods, clothing, gold, and, most disturbingly, high quantities of military-grade weaponry.
His faith also made him an avowed opponent of public school, and in fact, all forms of education other than homeschooling. Indeed, he believed that public school was a government conspiracy to indoctrinate children and lure them from the righteous path of God.
He had come to this belief around the time he was thirty, before Tara was born. At this time, he had pulled her older brothers—Tony, Shawn, Tyler, and Luke—out of school. The children born after this decision—Audrey, Richard, and Tara—never had the chance to attend school at all, having come into the world after Gene had undergone his most intense phase of radicalization. He had removed the telephone from the house, stopped renewing his driver’s license, and started hoarding food and weapons. This was the only world these children knew. Like the prophet he believed himself to be, Gene also felt compelled to share his gospel with others, and frequently hounded churchgoers at local Mormon houses of worship with his beliefs.
He believed in living “off-the-grid” and adhering to strict self-sufficiency, without any help from the government. Gene also had a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur, believing that the federal government was out to get him for defying the “brainwashing” being done in schools and other mainstream institutions of American society.
He also detested what he saw as the “frivolities” of modern life, like interior carpeting, wallpaper, and even most forms of basic hygiene (including basic practices like washing one’s hands after using the bathroom). Tara recalls learning early on that “frivolous” was a severe slander in her family. To him, frivolities were false idols, worshipped by unbelievers who had strayed from the true path of God.
Around the time Tara was seven or eight, Grandma-down-the-hill presented her with a startling offer: to take her to Arizona, away from her family, and enroll her in public school. Tara was naturally apprehensive at the idea of leaving behind her family and the world she’d known. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she was also fearful about the idea of school itself, having been subjected to her father’s anti-education diatribes for her entire life up to that point.
Tara’s grandmother told her to wake up early and sneak out while her family was still asleep. She would then be taken to Arizona in her car. In the end, however, Tara simply couldn’t go through with it. She thought about the worry she would cause her parents and her siblings, and what they would imagine had become of her when she went missing.
When morning came, Tara did not come out to meet her grandparents. For now, at least, she chose Buck’s Peak.
Gene also became obsessed with the story of Randy Weaver and his family during Tara’s early years. Gene told his family that the Weavers were their ideological and religious fellow travelers, “freedom fighters” who had come under the bootheel of the federal government for refusing to subject their children to the “socialist” indoctrination of public school.
He terrorized Tara and her siblings with the lurid story of how federal agents had massacred the Weavers in their cabin—and that the Westovers would surely be next, unless they took the necessary steps to prepare and defend themselves.
This prompted a frantic stockpiling of weapons and munitions by Gene, an early display for Tara of the paranoia and violence that was so crucial to her family’s beliefs. He came home one day with a large cache of military-grade weaponry, including over a dozen SKS rifles (semi-automatics). Then, he purchased a machine that would enable the family to make their own bullets.
He also forced the family to prepare for the inevitable day when they would have to flee to the mountains to escape the Feds. Tara recalls days of endlessly canning peaches and preparing MREs (meals ready-to-eat) to ensure the family would have enough supplies to survive on their own in the wilderness.
Gene believed that the “Medical Establishment” injected brainwashing drugs into people’s bodies. As a result, he refused to let the children go to the doctor, even when they sustained grievous injuries working in his junkyard or when they got debilitatingly sick.
This was another outgrowth of his religious fundamentalism. Gene insisted that God had provided all the medicine that anyone would ever need in the form of natural herbs and oils which could be manufactured and administered right in the home on Buck’s Peak. Indeed, he would come to refer to these remedies as “God’s Pharmacy.”
His wife Faye acted as the family’s primary medical caregiver, concocting homeopathic remedies for the children. Tara and her siblings were treated with their mothers’ herbal mixtures of calendula, lobelia, and witch hazel.
Once, when Tara was 12, she started suffering from painful sore throats. After Faye failed to reduce her swelling with echinacea and calendula, Tara was instructed to let the sun shine into her throat—to allow the supposed healing powers of the sun to cure her. For a month that winter, she laid out in the backyard of their home for up to 30 minutes every day, with her mouth agape, to no effect whatsoever.
Looking back, of course, Tara sees that these medicines were never effective in curing illnesses, or even in relieving pain. She endured years of needless suffering because of her parents’ anti-medical ideology.
Nevertheless, Faye’s alleged expertise in homeopathic medicine won her a reputation as an effective healer among those in the area who similarly rejected medical science. When Tara was a child, Faye became an assistant to a midwife named Judy, helping this woman with home births for families who rejected conventional prenatal care or hospital deliveries. Faye’s entrance into the world of midwifery was largely at Gene’s behest, who insisted that it would be important for the family’s self-reliance if Faye knew how to deliver their future children (and grandchildren) free from the oppressive clutches of the state.
As an adult, Tara dryly notes that Judy had no formal credentials or training which would have qualified her to deliver babies—she was a midwife simply because she said she was.
Tara soon came to see just how risky and frightening unlicensed midwifery could be. Faye was clearly distraught by the idea of wielding this kind of responsibility, in which life and death hung in the balance.
She shared stories with Tara of births in which the mother suffered from uncontrollable hemorrhaging, or where the baby had the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. These were situations that could have been easily resolved had they taken place in a hospital setting: but they didn’t, and Faye had to guide the mother and child through these situations with her fragmentary medical knowledge. Still, she helped deliver dozens of babies under Judy’s “tutelage.” Eventually, when Judy moved away, Faye took over as head midwife.
The risks were high. Midwifery was legal in the state, but Faye had no license to practice it. If a delivery went wrong, she could face severe civil and even criminal penalties. While still harrowing, Tara sees with hindsight that her mother derived a genuine sense of purpose from serving as a midwife. For Faye, it was thoroughly empowering: she was in charge, she wielded awesome responsibilities, and she was bringing in real money. This money even enabled the family to reinstall the phone line, which Gene had previously removed. Even Gene was willing to set aside his usual strictures against women working, as he believed that Faye’s midwifery was a form of rebellion against the government.
Tara recalls accompanying her mother to a delivery when she was nine. To this point, she had been proud of her mother’s work, and saw how the other people who were off the grid in their corner of Idaho respected her. On the way to the delivery, Faye rehearsed with Tara what the protocol would be if the Feds arrived. She was instructed to say nothing and give no information to the authorities. Tara was becoming aware of the risks. As her mom told her, “All it takes is one mistake, and you’ll be visiting me in prison.”
Growing up in the Westover home, Tara experienced more than just ideological extremism. Her parents’ beliefs had real-world consequences for the children, which frequently put Tara and her siblings in grave danger. Whether it was through near-death experiences in car crashes or maimings in the junkyard where Gene forced his children to work, it was a constant struggle for survival on Buck’s Peak.
Tara had no birth certificate, because she hadn’t been born in a hospital or delivered by a licensed medical professional with a witness present. Her family had chosen not to register her birth with the courthouse in town. Officially, the state of Idaho had no record of her existence. Even today, her actual date of birth cannot be determined with 100 percent certainty.
When Tara was nine, Faye decided that she should obtain birth certificates for all her children. This proved more difficult than expected, as she had no documents that could prove her children were, in fact, her own. The only documents for Tara were her christening and her baptismal records, each of which had a different birth date. Eventually, Tara was only issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth after Grandma-down-the-hill swore an affidavit in court attesting that Tara was born on September 27, 1986 (though there was internal family disagreement about the accuracy of this date).
Up until this point, Tara had never known when to celebrate her birthday. As an adult, Tara now sees how this most basic childhood experience had been denied to her. At the time, of course, she accepted it as normal. She believed that she had a birthday (she had been born after all) just like everybody else—it just changed from year-to-year.
But there would still be uncertainty around Tara’s actual birthday, even within her family. Years later, when Tara was applying to college, even Faye couldn’t remember whether her daughter was 16 or 20, observing, “It’s hard to keep track of how old you kids are.”
The family would take annual trips to visit Gene’s parents during the winter months, when the latter would snowbird in Arizona. This was usually to combat Gene’s intense bouts of depression, which would set over him during the harsh winters on the mountain in Idaho. He would take to bed and refuse to emerge from his room for days at a time.
Faye explained this away by likening Gene to a sunflower: he’d wither and die in the snow, so he needed to be replanted in the sun. Looking back, Tara now sees that this was a symptom of her father’s mental illness—but, like so many other things in her childhood, she accepted her mother’s rationalizations for the family’s need to uproot itself and cater to Gene’s needs.
While the family was in Arizona, Gene would assail Tara’s grandmother with his unorthodox views. When he found out that she was going to see the doctor, he informed her that herbalism (as practiced by Faye) was a sacred calling, one which used God’s own bounty on earth to cure sickness. He contrasted this with the godless, unnatural, and dangerous practices of modern medicine.
He claimed that “doctors and pills” were Grandma’s gods, and that she had given herself over to false idols. He thoroughly believed that doctors were in the business of slowly poisoning their patients over time. He even accused his mother of being an agent of the Illuminati.
(Shortform note: The Illuminati were an eighteenth-century Enlightenment group that operated in Bavaria. Modern-day conspiracy theorists like Gene, however, believe that an all-powerful and clandestine group that calls itself the Illuminati secretly controls world events, ranging from the French Revolution to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. They frequently claim that presidents of the United States are tools of the Illuminati. The conspiracy theory has many adherents among members of the far-right American militia movement.)
One day during this trip, Gene abruptly declared that the family would have to hit the road back to Idaho, immediately. The family began their journey home in the early evening, meaning that they would be doing most of the 12-hour drive in the middle of the night. No one on board was wearing a seatbelt. Gene made Tara’s 17-year-old brother Tyler do the entire drive in their uninsured vehicle.
Around 6 am, Tyler fell asleep at the wheel, having driven nonstop all night through Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. The resulting crash was horrific. In addition to the family’s new collection of broken bones, missing teeth, severe bruises, and emotional trauma, the car was surrounded by downed power lines. A farmer who witnessed the crash called the utility company to deactivate the lines. Only then could the family emerge from the car in relative safety. Miraculously, everyone survived and managed to make it back to Buck’s Peak, but it was a defining moment for young Tara.
Faye came out of the crash worst of all. Although she was never properly treated for it, her post-crash symptoms as described by Tara clearly point to a severe and permanently damaging concussion.
Tara recalls that her mother was never quite the same after the accident. She had difficulty being around bright lights, and confined herself to the basement for a week after the crash, where she could rest in darkness. Her eyes, meanwhile, had swollen to a deep black. Later, Tara would learn that these “raccoon eyes” were a classic sign of serious brain injury. She would also continue to suffer from near-constant migraines, for which her homeopathic remedies were of little use. Most troublingly, Faye’s short-term memory was impaired. In the ensuing months, she would repeatedly call Tara by the names of her siblings.
One might have thought that the trauma she suffered would have been a wake-up call to Faye, vividly demonstrating to her the danger in which her husband had placed the entire family. But the opposite happened. Her survival only seemed to deepen Faye’s belief in her healing powers. Although still clearly suffering from the effects of the concussion, Faye redoubled her efforts to manufacture large batches of essential oils out of herbs like eucalyptus, sandalwood, and ravensara. She mixed different combinations together, believing that each mix had specific properties that could cure specific ailments. Over the years, she would create dozens of these “medicines.”
She also delved deeper into pseudo-scientific New Age “energy healing,” believing that she could use the power of energy to cure injuries and disease, simply by laying her hands on someone in the right places and applying the right amount of pressure. She claimed that God was working through her fingers. Tara recalls diagrams of chakras and pressure points appearing throughout the house around this time.
Soon, Faye began selling her blended oils and charging clients for “energy work.” She may have had no license or training, but Tara’s mother was well on her way to becoming the established medical authority for fellow off-the-grid families in their county. Eventually, Faye came to believe that she could diagnose illnesses simply by touching people and objects. In effect, she had come to believe that she possessed magical powers.
The accident (and his guilt at having fallen asleep behind the wheel) may have been the final push that Tara’s older brother Tyler needed to leave home. One month after the accident, in the summer before Tara turned ten, he declared that he would be leaving home to attend college. His determination to learn was truly remarkable. He had a lifelong love of learning and was a true autodidact, having taught himself algebra and calculus.
Unsurprisingly, Gene was displeased with his son’s decision. For Gene, college was the epicenter of secular, godless sin and government indoctrination. He had told Tara that college was “extra school for people too dumb to learn the first time around.” He believed that liberal or “socialist” college professors (a favorite epithet of his and a frequent target of his denunciations) set themselves above God, believing their wisdom to be greater than His. That Tyler intended to study at Brigham Young University, an institution run by the Church of Latter-Day Saints, made no difference to Gene.
Tyler had always been different. He was intellectually curious, studious, and enjoyed reading books. His demeanor and interests set him apart from his more rough-and-tumble brothers, whom Tara would later liken to a pack of wolves—always testing one another, always looking for weakness. This formed the basis of a special bond between Tara and Tyler. It was Tyler who introduced her to classical music, and helped ignite her first sparks of interest in the world outside Buck’s Peak.
Once he left for college, he rarely returned home. Years later, Tara, looking back through the lens of her own liberation from the family, would observe that he was “building a new life for himself across enemy lines.”
His decision to go to college and openly defy Gene’s propaganda planted a seed in Tara. It would serve as a powerful example of a life that could be achieved outside the confines of her isolated world. Tara would later walk the path that had been paved by Tyler.
Given her own meager crumbs of an education, Tara saw Tyler’s pursuit of college as revolutionary. The only education she had received had been homeschooling from her mother. Faye would announce the beginning of these sessions by declaring that they would be “doing school.” Initially, Faye had been idealistic about homeschooling, believing that she was offering her children a better education than what they would receive in public school. Even homeschooling, however, soon ran afoul of Gene’s ideological and religious fanaticism. He wanted the children to learn practical skills, and fought with Faye to have them start working in the family’s junkyard.
Just as with her midwifery and her homeopathy, Faye had no formal training or license to properly conduct homeschooling. Sadly, the results showed. Tara’s brother Luke was barely literate, while Tara herself had almost no instruction in basic math. Faye’s only teaching materials were some paperbacks and a motley collection of old textbooks. When she was “reading” her math textbook, Tara would usually just run her finger down the centerfold of the page—when it reached the bottom, she credited herself with having “read” the page. Occasionally, however, Tara’s literary diet would be supplemented by trips to the local library, where she and her siblings were able to read some children’s books.
Even this makeshift schooling came to an end when Gene’s ideology hardened and became even more extreme as Tara grew older. “Doing school” had ceased altogether by the time she was eight. For Tara’s family, schooling was secondary to work around the house and in the junkyard, where Gene would scrap metal from old cars, which served as the main source of the family’s meager income. After “doing school” was discontinued, Tara tried to keep up her education on her own as best as she could, reading whatever textbooks were still laying around.
She also read the New Testament and the Book of Mormon (the touchstone documents of her family’s faith) and began writing rudimentary essays on the doctrines of faith and sacrifice. Even though the arcane prose in these texts was difficult, Tara now sees that she was learning a critical skill: the patience to read things she could not yet understand.
Tyler may have been off to college, but Tara’s future (for now) was in the junkyard with her father and brothers. This, along with Faye’s midwifery, was the family’s means of income. The winter after Tyler left, Tara began working as part of her father’s junkyard crew—at the age of ten.
She describes the junkyard as a dangerous and desolate place, cluttered with leaking car batteries, rusting corrugated tin, and jagged pieces of brass piping. Tara’s job was to sort aluminum, iron, copper, and steel. Gene was more concerned with efficiency than safety. He even compelled Tara to remove her rubber working gloves and hard hat, telling her that they would only slow her down.
Tara quickly realized how hazardous working in the junkyard would be. She frequently saw her brothers getting maimed or burned. She’d even seen other members of the work crew lose fingers while cutting metal in the junkyard. Tara herself was hit in the stomach with a steel cylinder that her father had hurled through the air in an attempt to get it into a sorting bin.
Of course, the only medical treatment anyone received was from Faye’s ineffective homeopathic remedies.
Gene reassured his daughter that God and the angels wouldn’t let any harm come to her. Based on what she’d already seen, Tara was beginning to have her doubts.
One day, Gene forced Tara to pack iron scraps into a flatbed trailer, while he was operating a forklift that was dumping more iron into the trailer. Tara was stabbed in the leg by a piece of iron, then nearly crushed to death by the load of iron that her father was dumping onto her from the forklift. As was typical, Gene was barely concerned with Tara’s safety and wellbeing after this incident, being more upset about the fact that she would now be losing a working day due to her injury.
Based on her diagnostic method of laying hands on Tara’s body, Faye concluded that Tara had suffered kidney damage. Tara was given a mixture of juniper and mullein flower and sent on her way.
On another occasion, when Tara was 10, her older brother Luke accidentally set his legs on fire in the course of draining gasoline from old cars in the junkyard. As no one was home, Tara had to treat his burns by wrapping her brother’s legs in garbage bags and placing them in water. Throughout, she was traumatized by Luke’s relentless screams of agony. Later, Faye and Gene spent the night with a scalpel, removing the bits of plastic from the garbage bag that had fused to the burn wounds.
The children were instructed to lie about Luke’s accident on behalf of their parents. If anyone asked, they were told to say that Luke was sick. Gene warned that the Feds would take the children away from the family if word got out, and that Luke would be put into a government hospital, where he would succumb to a fatal infection.
Tara’s final years living full-time under her parents’ roof brought new challenges. As she matured into her teenage years, she saw that there would be new attempts by the highly patriarchal men in her life to control her body and sexuality. She also experienced a painful lesson in how crucial a role violence played in her family dynamic.
By the time Tara was 11, she knew she wanted to get away from the junkyard. Following her older sister Audrey’s lead, Tara decided to get a job in town.
She went to the local gas station and posted a card advertising her services as a babysitter. Soon, she had her calendar filled with babysitting jobs. Of course, she was available at all times since she didn’t go to school herself. These jobs gave Tara a strong feeling of accomplishment and some real autonomy. She had some money of her own, where she’d had none before.
Through another babysitting contact, Tara learned of a dance class that took place in the back of the local gas station/convenience store. When she showed up to participate, she saw that this new activity would clash with her father’s stern, paternalistic morals regarding women and sexuality. She would have to wear an “immodest” leotard and dance shoes, clothing that would reveal her legs above the ankles.
Faye actually supported her daughter in this endeavor, taking her to the mall to buy the necessary clothes—under strict orders, however, not to show Gene. She was learning how to lie to her father, to conceal parts of her life and her identity that she knew would run afoul of his religious ideals.
Eventually, however, Gene found out the truth about the dance class and stopped Tara from going, telling her that the only things she was learning were promiscuity and immodesty. His censoring of her female identity and self-expression was a grim portend for what his attitude would be toward her as she entered puberty and womanhood.
In a sequence that would come to be repeated many times over the years, Faye ultimately yielded to Gene and took his side in the dispute, where she had previously been supportive of Tara.
But Faye still sought another outlet for her youngest daughter. She subsequently enrolled Tara in voice classes, which she paid for with her earnings from her homeopathy practice. Tara did well and eventually became good enough to start singing in church. Her performance met with praise from many of the Westovers’ friends and acquaintances in the congregation.
Gene, surprisingly, was beaming with pride, telling everyone how blessed the family was to have someone with talent like Tara’s. Looking back, Tara notes that her father seemed to let go of his paranoia and anger when he heard her sing. For those brief moments, he was transported—and transformed.
Tara landed the leading role in a local production of Annie when she was 13. Going to the auditions and rehearsals opened Tara’s eyes to a new world and a new community of people who were different—people who weren’t preparing for the end of the world.
This contrast appeared especially stark as the year 2000 approached, and Gene became fixated by a new source of paranoia: Y2K.
Gene was a Y2K conspiracy theorist, believing that all computers would shut down when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000. According to this theory, this would cause the world’s electrical, water, and nuclear systems to melt down, bringing about widespread looting, panic, death, and destruction.
Gene took steps to prepare his family for what he saw as an inevitable result of man’s foolish and heretical faith in modern technology.
In many ways, Gene looked forward to the end of civilization at Y2K with a strange sort of glee. He saw it as a vindication of his beliefs and had made a point of reminding everyone at church how well-prepared his family was for the chaos that would soon descend.
The failure of the world to end, then, sent Gene into a deep emotional tailspin. Tara recalls his disappointment as the clock turned from 12:00 to 12:10 to 1:30 AM, with no signs of electricity failing or civilization collapsing. His prophecy had been a false one.
Even as an adolescent, Tara saw her father as being smaller and more frail in that moment. His disappointment made him oddly childlike. She even wondered what sort of cruel God could deny him what he’d been preparing his whole life for. His spirit was broken.
The next sequence of events in Tara’s life was all-too-familiar. Her father sank into a deep depression over the failure of Y2K to materialize, which necessitated another trip to Arizona to revive his spirits.
During the trip, of course, he harried Tara’s grandmother over her use of modern medicine (a recurring source of conflict between the two) and touted the effectiveness of Faye’s herbal remedies.
Much as the Arizona trip of a few years ago had ended, one day Gene abruptly announced that the family would be heading back to Idaho, once again in the middle of the night. As the family raced through a blinding Utah snowstorm, they experienced yet another violent car crash, in which Tara severely injured her neck.
In the weeks following this crash, Tara experienced great difficulty moving her neck. Her mother’s by-now-standard homeopathic treatments and energy healing did nothing to alleviate her pain.
It was at this time that a figure with whom she’d had little previous contact entered her life: her older brother Shawn. Being the youngest, Tara had a minimal relationship with Shawn up to this point, as he had left the family home at 17 to pursue work in trucking and welding. He had now returned home after many years of being away. Shawn had an unsavory reputation in the community, being well-known as a bully, brawler, and all-around provocateur.
Tara soon had her own firsthand experience with Shawn’s volatility when he, without warning, put his hands around her head and violently twisted it—to help pop her neck back into place following the accident, or so he claimed. This harsh “treatment” actually did help: Tara could once again pivot her neck. But his non-consensual laying of hands on Tara foreshadowed what was to come between the two siblings. Tara would spend much of the rest of her time on Buck’s Peak subject to Shawn’s displays of kindness, which were all too often followed by displays of terrifying cruelty and violence.
Other warning signs of Shawn’s unstable and combative personality soon emerged. When he would drive her to rehearsals at the theater, Shawn would bait and bully Tara’s friends there. He would flick off their hats or knock soda out of their hands, to dominate and humiliate them.
Shortly after Shawn came back home, he invited Tara to come along with him on a long-haul trucking job down the West Coast. Tara agreed, excited by the possibility of travel and the opportunity to spend time with this mysterious older brother about whom she knew so little.
The trip was hazardous from the start: Shawn was operating on little sleep and even faked the reports at inspection points to make it look like he was getting more rest than he actually was. The more menacing side of his personality also presented itself to Tara. One night, he decided to teach her martial arts, explaining to her how to inflict maximum damage and pain on one’s opponent with only two fingers. He also showed her techniques like how to throw her full body weight behind a punch and crush someone’s windpipe. Clearly, Shawn had an appetite for violence.
But Tara was still enjoying the time with her brother. She recalls passing the time with him by playing elaborate word games, learning trucker lingo, eating junk food, and playing video games—all new experiences for her. The undercurrent of violence was there, but had not yet fully surfaced.
Tara was also learning that Shawn could be emotionally abusive, especially to women and girls. He’d become acquainted with a girl named Sadie who was involved in the same theater as Tara. Sadie had a crush on Shawn, and he used that leverage to manipulate and psychologically torture this girl every chance he got.
If he saw her speaking with another boy, Shawn would give Sadie the cold shoulder and refuse to speak to her. Other times, he would force her to buy items for him, only to change his mind and chastise her for bringing him the wrong thing. He would repeat this exercise with her several times over the course of a given night.
Eventually, Sadie began altering her behavior to appease Shawn’s volatile personality. She even demanded that boys at school stop walking next to her, lest Shawn see them when he picked her up after school.
Eventually, it would be Tara’s turn to be a direct recipient of Shawn’s wrath. One day, Shawn ordered her to fetch him a glass of water, and threatened not to drive her into town the next day if she didn’t comply. Perhaps tired of his bossiness, Tara dumped the glass on his head. Shawn’s reaction was swift and brutal.
He chased Tara down the hallway and demanded she apologize. When she refused, he lifted her off the ground by her hair, dragged her into the bathroom, and pushed her head into the toilet.
He then used on her one of the same torture techniques he had taught her on their recent road trip: twisting her wrist and pushing it in a spiral against her inner forearm, causing excruciating pain.
Tara turned 15 in September 2001—the same month as the 9/11 attacks. While this major geopolitical event sparked the predictable doomsday proclamations from Gene, his predictions of a struggle for the Holy Land were second on Tara’s mind. She was now fully in puberty, which brought increased attention to her body and new efforts by the men in her life to control her sexuality.
She recalls her body changing at this time as she reached sexual maturity. Most of all, the full weight of her family’s highly patriarchal and often misogynistic views on women, marriage, and sexuality soon began to press upon Tara. Gene became obsessed with the alleged indecency of women in the community, with family dinners marked by his denunciations of short hemlines and low-cut blouses. Tara recalls not wanting to be seen as one of these women at this stage of her life.
Gene was hardly the only source of sexual repression in the household, however. Shawn also began to shame Tara for her alleged acts of impropriety. He harshly chastised her for her friendship with Charles, a young man she met at the theatre, telling Tara that she was developing a reputation for being “that kind of girl.” He also started calling her a “whore” for wearing makeup and lip gloss. One night, as punishment, Shawn forced his youngest sister to walk home for 12 miles in the sub-zero conditions of an Idaho winter.
The abuse only continued as Tara got deeper into her teen years. One morning, she woke up to a blinding pain of what felt like needles in her brain and throat. It dawned on her that Shawn was astride her, choking her with both hands, while screaming “Slut!” and “Whore!” It was only through the intervention of her mother and Tyler that Tara survived the assault.
Yet Shawn could also be fiercely protective of Tara. This protectiveness, too, may have been rooted in Shawn’s need for dominance and control (and his patriarchal notions about needing to “guard” women), but it was certainly a part of his overall behavior toward his sister.
For example, Tara recalls Shawn standing up to Gene and physically threatening him when he saw that Gene had tried to force Tara to operate a dangerous hydraulic metal-cutting tool at the junkyard. Indeed, Shawn was the only one who could stand up to Gene on a consistent basis—and win.
Tara’s feelings toward Shawn were complicated. On the one hand, he was a violent abuser who seemed to have little regard for the physical and emotional safety of others. On the other hand, however, she did enjoy a special bond with him.
Around this time, Shawn was severely injured when he hit a cow with his motorcycle while driving home in the dark. Tara recalls her horror at witnessing the scene of the accident and her fear that Shawn would die. She even made the decision to take him to the hospital, where she’d never been before.
Shawn’s assault and his own injury shortly thereafter were defining moments for Tara. She knew she had to leave the instability and volatility of the Westover home. In this, she received encouragement from Tyler. He told her that she was reaching a point where if she did not get out soon, she would never get out.
He suggested to her that she try to enroll at Brigham Young University in Utah. He pointed out that the school had a history of accepting homeschooled students and that all she would need to do was pass the ACT, a standardized test for college admissions in the United States.
Even as a teenager, Tara could see the life she was destined for if she stayed on Buck’s Peak. She would be married off at 18 or 19, and she and her husband would be given some remote corner of the family property on which to build a house and start their own family. She would likely have a life which replicated that of her own mother: learning homeopathy, bearing children, and acting as a midwife.
Tara was now determined to get out, to seek a different life off of Buck’s Peak, just as Tyler had done. She drove 40 miles to the nearest bookstore and purchased an ACT study guide. But after being confounded by the algebraic notations in the math section, she realized just how deep her ignorance ran. It wasn’t simply that she didn’t know how to solve the problems—she didn’t even recognize the symbols. She was mathematically illiterate.
The next day, she drove the same distance to purchase an algebra textbook: she now knew that she would need to cram years worth of learning into a few short months. Tara set to work teaching herself the most basic mathematical operations like multiplying fractions and decimals—things she would have mastered years before, had she had the benefit of a proper education.
But slowly, painstakingly, she made progress. She even began to understand the abstraction of trigonometry, thanks to some key help from Tyler in deciphering what had once been an unintelligible mathematical language.
She also received encouragement from her mother. In unguarded moments, away from her husband’s denunciations of liberalism and secularism, Faye was occasionally capable of being quite supportive of Tara’s ambitions. When Tara expressed some hesitation about her decision to go to college, Faye was steadfast. “Of all my children, you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze. Don’t let anything stop you from going.”
Tara was nervous about her chances when the time came to take the test. While she’d made progress, her math skills were still substandard. She also lacked a basic understanding of grammar, and the only science book she’d ever read had detachable pages for coloring.
Because she would be applying to BYU at 16 (two years before most kids go to college), she needed to earn a high score of 27 on the test to be admitted. Thus, she not only needed to make up for a lifetime of missed education, she needed to do better than her peers.
When she showed up on test day, everything was unfamiliar. She’d never taken a test (this wasn’t part of Faye’s “doing school”), so she was unfamiliar with how a scantron worked or where to mark down her answers. She was at a total disadvantage.
Tara scored a 22 on her first attempt, short of what she needed for BYU. But she was heartened nonetheless: she wasn’t that far off the mark and she had scored better than she thought she could, given how much was stacked against her. On her next attempt, she scored a 28.
Elated by this achievement, Tara applied to BYU the following week and told her father that she would no longer work for him in the junkyard. Tyler helped her write her application, telling the admissions board that she’d been educated according to a strict curriculum designed by her mother (though this was an obvious falsehood).
She was still troubled by pangs of guilt that she was somehow betraying her family, but she also knew that going to college was the right decision for her. Sure enough, she was accepted for the January semester. While disapproving of Tara’s decision to go to college, Gene saw her achievement as a vindication of his way of life, remarking, “It proves our home school is as good as any public education.”
Explore what made your upbringing unique.
In a few sentences, describe something you were taught to believe growing up.
How did this belief differ from that of someone you met later in life?
What are some examples of beliefs that might prevent a victim of abuse from speaking out about their experience?
Life at college would bring new opportunities, as well as new challenges for Tara. She began wriggling free from her family’s dogma, but was constantly reminded of just how profound an effect Buck’s Peak had on her. Her new experiences at college would force Tara to look at her old life on Buck’s Peak in a whole new light.
On New Year’s Day, Faye drove Tara to her new life at BYU. What struck Tara immediately was the noise in Provo, Utah, where the university was located. Growing up on Buck’s Peak, she had been accustomed to constant silence. Here, however, there was noise from crosswalk signals, motor traffic, and people on the streets. It was her first small taste of culture shock.
She received an even bigger shock when she met her roommates. One of them wore clothes that her father would have surely decried as frivolous and indecent, like tank tops with spaghetti straps and pink pajama bottoms with “Juicy” written on the back. They also shopped on the Sabbath and, overall, appeared to lead highly secular lives.These were the exact kind of women that her parents and Shawn had told her to stay away from.
Tara quickly clashed with these roommates over issues of cleanliness and personal hygiene. Growing up, Gene had taught Tara that practices like washing one’s hands after using the bathroom and disposing of rotten food in a garbage bag were frivolous. Thus, Tara thought nothing of leaving moldy peaches in the refrigerator or only showering once a week.
Although obviously intelligent, Tara lacked much of the foundational knowledge required for college-level work. Elementary concepts like how to write essays were completely foreign to her, as were most of the basic facts of American and world history. She’d heard of figures like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, but was completely lost when her professor began discussing the “philosophical underpinnings” of the American Revolution in the works of writers like the ancient Roman orator Cicero and the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. Unsurprisingly, she flunked her first American history quiz.
In a Western art class, she learned of another massive gap in her knowledge about the world. She’d volunteered to read a section of their book during a class discussion, but she stumbled on a particular word, asking innocently, “I don’t know this word. What does it mean?”
The professor rolled his eyes and said, “Thanks for that,” while the rest of the class sat in silence. They thought she’d been joking. Afterward, a classmate told her that she shouldn’t make jokes like that, and that what they had been discussing wasn’t funny. But Tara hadn’t been joking. She was deadly serious about never having encountered this word before.
Only later that day, when she looked it up online, did she come to understand the full gravity of this word she’d never heard before: “Holocaust.” As she learned more, she was horrified by several things all at once—the barbarity of the event itself, the sheer power of man’s inhumanity to man, and her own ignorance for having never heard of it. Later, Tara would discover that anti-Semitism was a core component of her father’s conspiratorial worldview. He believed that a cabal of Jewish bankers had conspired to start both world wars and that they had actually been the architects of the Holocaust. Her understanding of the Holocaust was further hampered by the fact that she also didn’t know Europe was a continent composed of many countries, not one big country. Naturally, little of what the professor said made sense.
As with the ACT, Tara didn’t just lack foundational knowledge. She didn’t know how to be a student, take a test, or properly study. She knew little, and didn’t know how to learn.
Her only test had been the multiple-choice ACT. She therefore assumed that all tests were multiple-choice. It’s no surprise that she was baffled when she opened up her test booklet in her Western art course to find that the exam was in open-question format.
She also didn’t know that she was supposed to be reading the assigned textbook. Because it was an art class, she thought that all she needed to do was look at the paintings and sculptures in the book and identify the artist and the specific work. Again, she failed her first exams in this course. It was only when a friend advised her to actually read the textbook that she began receiving B’s and even A’s.
In some other subjects, Tara found more success. Her English professor, for example, praised her natural talent as a writer, but remarked that her writing was oddly formal and stilted. Tara didn’t share that her writing style reflected the fact that she’d only learned to read by studying texts like the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Her prose naturally mimicked the arcane style of those works, because she knew little else.
Tara began to do better and better as she became more accustomed to university life and discovered how to truly be a student. By the time the semester ended, she had done well in courses in history, English, music theory, and Western civilization. She was confident that she’d be able to qualify for a partial scholarship, which she desperately needed to remain in school.
Unfortunately, Tara wasn’t entirely free from Buck’s Peak. When she returned home for the summer, she was told that she wouldn’t be able to stay with the family unless she worked with her father in the junkyard. She would be forced to break her promise to herself to never again work for her father. She vividly recalls the sinking feeling that all her accomplishments at college, all of her personal and intellectual growth, was negated by having to revert to her old way of life.
During this summer, Tara also struck up a friendship and quasi-romantic relationship with Charles, one of the young men with whom she’d been involved in the theatre program. As an outsider to her world, Charles was able to prompt Tara to question much of what she’d been told to believe growing up. He told her that he was angry on her behalf that she’d been deprived of a proper education. He pulled back the curtain on things Tara had never noticed or thought about before, like the fact that the Westover home smelled like rotten plants from Faye’s herbal remedies practice. Bit-by-bit, Tara was learning just how abnormal her life with her family was.
She was beginning to see how absurd her father’s obsessions with the Illuminati and the supposedly oppressive and socialist federal government were. Her attempts to defend her upbringing now felt rote, perfunctory, and emotionless. Despite her obvious fondness for Charles, however, she was unable to take the next steps in their relationship. Her family’s patriarchal and puritanical lessons and values still exerted a powerful hold over her sexual freedom.
Unfortunately, being back home also meant that she was once again exposed to Shawn’s cruelty and abuse. The doctors at the hospital had warned that Shawn’s personality may have been irrecoverably altered following the brain injury he sustained from the motorcycle crash. He had become even more hostile, impulsive, and wantonly mean than he was before.
He took to mocking her college education and stigmatizing her for it, labelling her “uppity.” He also began calling her “wench” and “Wilbur” (a reference to the pig from Charlotte’s Web) when he was supervising her work in the junkyard, and often in front of Charles. Soon, however, he began branding her with a far worse epithet.
(Shortform note: Shawn started calling Tara the N-word. It’s impossible to summarize this part of the book without using the word itself, and it’s important to include it, as it gives powerful insights into Shawn’s personality, Tara’s continued intellectual growth, and the Westover family’s racial politics.)
After a long day in the junkyard, Tara’s hands and face would often be covered in black soot. As a result, Shawn began calling her “nigger.” Tara wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with this word (she’d heard Gene use it before), but she was completely ignorant as to its true weight, meaning, and history.
In her first semester at BYU, however, she’d learned about slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. She came face-to-face with the brutal reality of race relations in American history. This was a story she’d never heard before: even iconic figures like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were completely unknown to Tara. To the extent that she knew anything about America’s racial past, she’d been raised to believe that slavery had been a benevolent institution and that stories of anti-black violence and discrimination were largely myths. She now saw how anti-black racism was part-and-parcel of her father’s belief system. Even years later, while visiting Tara at college, he became upset when he saw a poster of MLK in Tara’s room, branding the civil rights icon a communist.
Tara’s new understanding of the history of her own country (especially the relatively recent history of the civil rights movement) caused her to see events and people in her own life in an entirely new light. She saw people like Shawn and her father as being the villains, the opponents, in a long struggle for freedom and equality. For the first time, she was able to place her family’s beliefs and practices in a wider historical context.
Tara was learning to rebel against her family’s orthodoxy in other ways as well. One night, while driving with Charles, she complained of a debilitating migraine. She told him that she had taken some lobelia and skullcap for the pain. Predictably, Faye’s homeopathic remedy failed to alleviate Tara’s symptoms.
Charles then suggested to Tara that she take a real painkiller, which he proceeded to retrieve out of his medicine cabinet. Tara initially balked. Imbibing the products of the hated and feared medical establishment would fly in the face of one of her father’s core teachings. But as Charles questioned why she believed taking a pill would be so harmful, she realized she had no answer. She couldn’t even articulate what she thought would happen if she took the pill.
She gave in to reason and took the painkiller. Within 20 minutes, her headache was gone. The pill had been more effective in 20 minutes than lobelia and skullcap had been in a lifetime.
Tara returned to school in the fall and continued her studies, though she was driven to a state of anxiety by her college algebra course. She asked Charles to tutor her in the subject, which he agreed to do when she returned home to Buck’s Peak for Thanksgiving.
Charles joined the Westovers for dinner for the holiday. It would be an evening Tara would never forget. Shawn was in a particularly hostile mood at dinner, making cruel and snide remarks to Tara and Charles. When Tara told Shawn not to touch her after he jabbed one of his fingers into her ribs, the situation rapidly escalated out of control.
Shawn pinned her down to the floor (just out of view of everyone else), cutting off airflow through her windpipe. Later on in the evening, he gut-punched her as she was bringing dinner rolls to the table. When Tara protested again (her resistance was obviously a trigger for him), Shawn once more pinned Tara to the floor and dragged her to the bathroom, where he shoved her face into the toilet. In the course of this attack, Tara broke her toe. This time, the assault was in full view of the family—and Charles.
Tara hated the idea of Charles seeing her in this state—as a victim, a helpless pawn of Shawn’s. So she tried to present it as a game, in which Shawn was only playfully roughhousing with her and there was no need to worry. She even made a point of laughing throughout her assault, to give off the impression that everything was just a joke, happening with her full consent.
Charles was deeply disturbed by the incident and by Tara’s refusal to acknowledge what had really happened. He parted ways with her, telling Tara that she was the only one who could rescue herself from her family.
Shawn would attack Tara on one more occasion. When she was back home a few weeks later for Christmas, she was out driving with Shawn when they happened upon Charles’ car in the parking lot of the local gas station. Shawn, with cunning instinct, immediately recognized that Tara didn’t want Charles to see her with Shawn, especially since she was covered in soot and grime from the junkyard. Shawn, of course, saw an opportunity to inflict maximum humiliation and emotional trauma on his younger sister. He demanded that she accompany him inside.
When she refused, he snapped. He dragged her out of the car and pinned her face-down onto the asphalt parking lot, breaking her wrist and ankle in the process. This attack was in public, so there were plenty of onlookers (though thankfully not Charles).
Tara retreated into the same defensive shell that she’d used during the Thanksgiving attack the month before: she pretended that it was all a joke. She made a public show of laughing as Shawn paraded her through the store at the gas station, in front of the people who’d witnessed the attack in the parking lot just minutes before. She ignored the pain from her wrist and ankle.
When they returned home, Tara went to her room to write about the experience in her diary. She couldn’t understand why Shawn did these things to her, even when she’d told him not to touch her and had begged him to stop. Later, Shawn came into her room with an ice pack and told her that she should always feel free to tell him if his “fun and games” went too far. In other words, she was responsible for not having stopped him. He was gaslighting her, denying her reality, and making her think that she had imagined the entire encounter as being more violent than it really was. It was, yet again, classic abuser behavior.
Tara had long convinced herself that Shawn’s violence was her fault—that if she’d just asked Shawn to stop in the right way, he would have. This night, however, she wrote about the experience in her diary plainly and honestly, without resorting to vague or euphemistic language. It was one of her first steps toward recognizing what Shawn truly was—and recognizing, also, how her family had implicitly condoned his abuse.
Years later, as a survivor, Tara would understand why she had come to believe that Shawn’s emotional manipulation had all been her fault. She saw that it was more comforting to accept the abuse as stemming from a flaw in herself, rather than in him—because if it was her defect, she would at least be able to control it. She was displaying a common symptom of abuse victims, that of sympathizing with their abuser or rationalizing away the abuse they suffer.
Tara’s academic career was about to take her to new heights of intellectual and personal discovery, taking her to places she’d never dreamed she would go. But the chaos and extremism of Buck’s Peak would continue to exert a powerful hold.
Even back at BYU, the spectre of Shawn’s abuse hung over Tara. It became clear to the bishop at the university that Tara was experiencing severe emotional trauma. She was also suffering from an infected tooth, for which she could not afford to seek treatment. Over the course of several meetings with him, she told him the truth about everything her brother had been doing to her over the years.
The bishop told her not to return home and assured her that the church would help her pay her rent and get the necessary funds together to remain in school and earn her degree. His only condition was that she honor her promise to never again work for her father. Tara was incredulous. How could she afford tuition and housing without working in the junkyard during the summer and on holiday breaks?
The bishop’s solution was simple: a government grant. This, he explained, was different than a student loan. Tara wouldn’t have to pay it back. She wouldn’t be in debt, but would instead have the financial freedom to pursue her studies. Gene had, of course, railed against the evils of government grants back on Buck’s Peak. To accept one, he cautioned, was to strike a deal with the devil: “They give you free money, then the next thing you know, they own you.”
As much as Tara was beginning to divorce herself from her father’s beliefs, they still influenced her decisions. She initially refused to pursue the grant and even turned down an offer of financial assistance from the bishop’s own discretionary fund.
Tara scraped by for the next few months, with her infected tooth, working multiple jobs to keep herself afloat. She even received an unlikely gift of $100 from Shawn. Through it all, she maintained her opposition to accepting help from the government. But eventually, she saw the irrationality of her opposition and agreed to file the paperwork. She even briefly returned to Buck’s Peak to steal copies of her parents’ tax returns in order to complete it properly.
She only needed $1,400 for the dental operation. She instead received a check for $4,000. The money had the opposite effect of what Gene had said. The money didn’t control her. It liberated her, giving her convictions actual weight. Now she really could honor her promise to herself to never again work for her father.
With her financial situation more secure, Tara was able to pour herself more vigorously into academics. She had a revelation in a psychology course while listening to a professor list the symptoms of bipolar disorder: depression, mania, paranoia, euphoria, delusions of grandeur, and persecution complexes. The professor was describing her father.
Later, the class discussed the role that mental illness had played in separatist movements and anti-government conflicts, as had happened in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Tara had never heard of Ruby Ridge, but when she looked it up, she saw that it was the site of the standoff between Randy Weaver and the federal government in 1992. These were the same Weavers whom Gene had labelled as fellow “freedom fighters” to Tara, the Weavers of the supposed massacre at the hands of ruthless government agents.
As Tara now learned, the real story was quite different. The Weavers’ cabin wasn’t laid under siege because of the family’s refusal to submit to government brainwashing, as Gene had said. Randy Weaver had, in fact, been selling illegal firearms and was deeply embedded in the white supremacist movement in that part of rural Idaho. The situation had devolved into a deadly standoff because Weaver (who was heavily armed and had children inside the cabin) refused to surrender peacefully. He was a criminal and would-be terrorist, not a patriotic defender of freedom.
Tara became deeply interested in bipolar disorder and wrote her term paper on the effects that bipolar parents have on their children. Her research showed her that such children are more prone to develop mood disorders themselves, and ththat ey suffer from the stressful environment that their mentally ill parents create.
She forcefully confronted her father the next time she saw him when she visited Buck’s Peak, demanding to know why he had subjected the family to so many terrifying stories that turned out to be completely untrue. He had no answer. This was the beginning of a long process of Tara separating herself from contact with her family: for the first time since starting college, she did not return to Buck’s Peak that summer.
That next spring, however, Tara would once again be exposed to the mayhem of Buck’s Peak. One morning at BYU, she awoke to a phone call from her sister Audrey, who told her that Gene had suffered a catastrophic burn injury in a gas tank explosion and wasn’t likely to survive. She urged Tara to return home to say goodbye.
When she got back to Buck’s Peak, Tara was horrified by her father’s condition, as well as the gruesome scene around him. Much of his skin had simply melted away or was fusing to other parts of his body. Faye and some other women were using butter knives to pry Gene’s ears from his skull, which had fused together in the course of the burn.
Faye was treating him with Rescue Remedy, the over-the-counter homeopathic that was supposedly effective for shock, as well with lobelia and skullcap—the same remedies that had been ineffective in treating minor scrapes and bruises for the children. Gene could barely ingest the medicine, since his throat had been entirely scarred from the burn. Still, he insisted that he’d rather die than go to the hospital.
Because he couldn’t take liquid, he was also succumbing to dehydration. The hospital offered to send a chopper to airlift him, but again Faye and Gene refused the treatment. He insisted on feeling what he described as “the Lord’s pain.”
Yet, somehow, against all odds, he survived. This survival would only serve to strengthen his fanatical beliefs. It was the ultimate vindication: he had endured a fiery trial by the Lord’s hand and come out the other side. It also solidified Faye’s belief (and the faith of those around her) in the power of her homeopathy. In her mind, her herbal remedies had seen her husband through a horrific third-degree burn. To Gene and Faye, their faith had now been rewarded and affirmed by the Almighty.
Sure enough, word spread of the supposedly miraculous healing powers of Faye’s homeopathy. Her business started booming, bringing the Westover family more cash than they’d ever had before. They began adding new rooms to the house and soon commanded a homeopathic business empire, with rooms full of employees and orders from all across the country. As Tara was to recall, her parents were now “the best-funded lunatics in the Mountain West.”
When Tara returned to school, she committed herself to studying history and politics. She realized that this was where her true intellectual passions lay. Her strong performance in a Jewish history course deeply impressed one of her professors. He became more intrigued by Tara when he discovered that she had only become aware of the Holocaust during her freshman year of college.
To have learned so much in such a short time, with no background knowledge, was nothing short of remarkable. He recommended that she apply to a study-abroad program at the University of Cambridge in England (which she’d never heard of before). Although her application was initially rejected, this professor made sure that Tara was accepted, once he shared with the admissions council the story of her upbringing.
Cambridge was unlike anything Tara had ever seen before. She was awed by the beautiful medieval architecture and the aura of ancient learning that seemed to pervade every corner of the campus. She thought she was dreaming when she set foot there, never believing that her imagination could produce anything quite so grand.
Her supervisor was the esteemed Professor Jonathan Steinberg, a global authority on the history of 20th-century Germany and the Holocaust. After speaking with him, she realized she wanted to study historiography, the study of how history is written.
She wanted to study how the gatekeepers of history had overcome their own ignorance, just as she had, and come to understand the past. As history was a constantly evolving field of study, with new intellectual frameworks and new pieces of evidence rewriting the story, even the great historians like Thomas Carlyle and Edward Gibbon could now be shown to have been wrong about key events. By studying them, Tara could hope to come to terms with her own distorted understanding of history.
Professor Steinberg was a masterful intellectual guide. He pointed her toward the key works that she needed to study and also helped refine her style as a writer. He was as strict about grammar and sentence construction as he was about content, even questioning the specific placement of commas in Tara’s work. Tara flowered as a scholar under his tutelage. When she handed in her essay comparing the works of the 18th-century Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke with the Federalist Papers, Steinberg was stunned by the quality of her work. He told her that it was one of the best essays he’d read in his 30 years at Cambridge. He told her that he would make sure she was accepted into whatever graduate program she chose to attend—and that he would take care of the fees.
Tara had earned her place. For the first time in her life, she believed that she had as much of a right to a fulfilling and intellectually enriched life as anyone else. Her strengths were innate—they had always been a part of who she was. It was only now that they were being given the chance to flourish.
Steinberg made good on his promise, sending Tara the paperwork to apply for the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which would provide for her room, board, and tuition for her graduate studies in England. She was accepted into the program after her first interview.
Think about the challenges of education.
Describe a time where you felt ignorant or stupid for not knowing something that everyone else around you seemed to know.
Write out the reasons why you think you lacked this knowledge.
What steps can you take to avoid having these knowledge gaps in the future?
Tara continued to excel as a student, liberating her mind from the ideological constraints into which it had been placed for her entire life. She was thinking for herself and exploring her mind’s true potential. But she would soon be forced to confront the true ugliness of her family’s inner dynamics.
When Tara returned to Cambridge as a graduate student through the Gates Scholarship, her status was different. She was not a guest, or a visitor. She was a member of the university.
Tara was learning about Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty was the more basic concept, a freedom from external constraints. If you weren’t physically prevented from taking action, you enjoyed negative liberty. Positive liberty, however, was defined by a mastery of the self. This meant having control over one’s mind, a freedom from irrationality and paranoia, and all forms of self-policing.
Tara realized that it was this positive liberty that had been denied to her by her family. She had not had freedom of thought, but had instead been instructed to believe in irrational and paranoid lies, which had stunted her intellectual growth. She had also been a victim of self-coercion, most notably through her conviction that Shawn’s abuse had been her fault and that she needed to censor or edit herself to prevent it. The time had come to, as Tara’s favorite Bob Marley lyric put, it “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”
Tara’s Cambridge friends were unlike any she’d known before. They were educated, erudite, and intellectually curious. She was set to embark on a whole new world of experiences as a full-fledged part of their world. She was no longer an outsider or observer looking in on this life: it was her life; she was of this world now.
She embarked on new cultural experiences that she never could have enjoyed before, including drinking red wine for the first time and travelling to Rome. She was in awe of the ancient city, and captivated by the interplay of buildings from antiquity with the modern infrastructure that surrounded her. She saw that she and her friends debating philosophy by the Trevi Foundation or discussing literature in the shadow of the Colosseum gave life to the ancient capital: they did not treat it as a dead relic, but instead made it the live background of their intellectual experience.
She began to embrace feminism, a word that had been a vile smear in the Westover home.
Tara immersed herself in the writings of second-wave feminists like Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Simone de Beauvoir. Reading these authors, Tara discovered that centuries of repression by the patriarchy had obscured the true extent of women’s capabilities.
At home, her womanhood had been stigmatized as a source of weakness or as something that needed to be guarded by the males in her life. Her sexuality was something to be repressed and her thoughts were castigated as being less worthy than those of men. But if the true extent of female capabilities had been unknowable since time immemorial, then Tara believed there was a positive corollary: that all her potential was untapped and her possibilities were limitless.
She excelled in her studies and began to write about the ideas in the works of John Stuart Mill, the 18th-century English philosopher. She was intrigued by his ideas of self-sovereignty, particularly as they pertained to her own previously repressed life. The quality of her work continued to impress her professors. After excelling in her graduate studies, Tara was accepted into the PhD program at Cambridge.
As a PhD candidate, Tara would no longer be studying the work of other historians. She now had to produce an original piece of research, to become a historian herself. She chose to bring her experience full circle: by studying Mormonism (her family’s faith) as an intellectual movement, not simply a religious one.
She reexamined the works of the Mormon prophets Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the texts that had been some of her earliest points of contact with the written word. This included studying practices like polygamy as social policy, not just as part of church dogma. Looking at her own religion in this scholarly and dispassionate way felt like an act of radical self-liberation. It was a final act of shedding the fundamentalism and dogma of her youth.
The December after she submitted her final graduate paper for the semester at Cambridge, Tara had returned to Idaho for a visit. Despite the family’s new wealth, all was not well on Buck’s Peak.
Since Tara had left for good, Shawn had married a woman named Emily, who had given birth to a son, Peter. The boy was sickly, having been born with underdeveloped lungs. In fact, his attempted homebirth had been such a close call that the Westovers made one of their rare visits to a hospital to deliver him. Years before, Tara had tried to warn Emily about Shawn’s violent nature, but Emily reacted with complete denial, insisting that Shawn was a changed man who had learned how to treat women well.
One night while Tara was visiting, Emily came running to Gene and Faye’s home crying and shaking with terror. Shawn had gotten angry with Emily for bringing home the wrong crackers for their son and violently thrown her out of the trailer in the dead of winter.
Yet Tara’s parents continued to do nothing about Shawn’s disturbing behavior, even when it put their grandson and daughter-in-law at clear risk.
In speaking about this incident with her sister Audrey, Tara learned that she, too, had been abused by Shawn. Being her older sister, Audrey had experienced all of it first.
Audrey would later recount to Tara via email that she never believed their mother would intervene to stop him and protect her daughters. But she was determined to do so now, before the situation escalated any further. Tara was afraid to reveal the abuse to her parents out of fear that they already knew and had chosen to do nothing about it.
The day after the sisters’ email exchange, Audrey confronted Faye about Shawn. Later that evening, Faye got in touch with Tara online to discuss the matter further. Faye confessed to having looked the other way at what her son was doing to her daughters. She had wanted to believe that Shawn was irrational and not in control of his actions and, therefore, not responsible for them. Faye acknowledged that she should have protected Tara and Audrey.
She also admitted that Gene was mentally ill, something she had never been willing to discuss with Tara before. It seemed like they had reached a breakthrough. But Faye’s support and understanding would sadly prove to be illusory.
When Tara returned to Buck’s Peak for Grandma-down-the-hill’s funeral (which Gene had dominated with his usual religious ranting), Audrey told Tara that nothing had changed. No one had taken any action at all.
The next Christmas, Tara returned home. She spent time with Shawn, who at least initially, appeared to be changed. His demeanor was calmer, his words more thoughtful. Perhaps he had mellowed with age. But this, too, was to prove false.
One night when they were alone, Shawn confronted Tara about her conversations with Audrey. Although Tara denied having spoken to her, Shawn once again revealed his malevolent streak. He called Audrey “a lying piece of shit” and said that he would be willing to murder her for her treachery (Shawn was often seen bradishing firearms), but he “didn’t want to waste a good bullet on a worthless bitch.”
That same night, Tara decided to reveal everything to her parents. Gene was outraged—at Tara. He demanded “proof” of the violent acts that Tara told him about. Tara insisted that he didn’t need proof, that the truth was plain and obvious and had been right in front of his face for years.
Faye, meanwhile, sat by completely silent, failing to rise in defense of Tara’s claims. Gene insisted that Shawn be given an opportunity to answer the charges in person. When Shawn came in, he gave Tara a knife that was covered in blood. He then told her that if she didn’t use the knife on herself, he would use it on her. This threat, made right in front of Faye and Gene, met with only mild rebukes from them.
Gene then lectured everyone about how little girls needed to be told how to behave appropriately around men, so as to not invite the wrong kind of attention. The full extent of the family’s violence, patriarchy, misogyny, victim-blaming, and rationalization of abuse was at last laid bare.
Tara fled the scene early the next morning, quite understandably in fear for her life. Later she would learn what the source of the blood on Shawn’s knife had been. He had brutally stabbed the family dog to death in a fit of rage when Gene had called him to the main house to answer Tara’s charges. This had happened in full view of his young son.
Tara later reflected that the choice of a knife was a deliberate one on Shawn’s part. He could have shot the dog in the head: there was hardly any shortage of guns around the Westover home. He wanted to use the knife to cause maximum pain, to feel the blood running down his hands as he did it, to experience the thrill of killing.
Back at Cambridge, Tara tried to shut out the awful events that had recently transpired on Buck’s Peak. But she couldn’t completely escape.
Shawn began sending her threatening emails and even called her long-distance one evening to openly muse about whether he should hire an assassin to murder Tara or do the deed himself. Once again, her parents downplayed the significance of what Shawn said, saying that he was only joking or didn’t really mean it.
Eventually, Shawn stopped calling her. He finally wrote her a letter claiming that he never wanted to speak to her again, and warned her to stay away from his wife and daughter. Tara’s parents, even her mother, defended Shawn’s actions as entirely justified. To them, she’d hurled baseless accusations at her brother and caused him and his family endless emotional anguish. To them, she was the abuser. It was a total denial and inversion of reality.
In the end, this force of denial even swept up Audrey, Tara’s erstwhile ally in the fight to bring the truth to light. The family was closing ranks—against their youngest daughter. Sure enough, Audrey likewise told Tara to stay away from her forever. She had lost her family.
Tara would finally be forced to choose between her new life and her old. She had to, at last, reconcile her obligations to her family with her commitments to society and—most importantly—to herself.
Amid all this turmoil, Tara won a visiting fellowship at Harvard. But the weight of her recent family trauma hung over this accomplishment like a dark cloud. Never had she felt so gloomy and indifferent about a piece of good news.
Tara fell into a deep crisis of reality. If her entire family had branded her as a liar, how could she truly trust her own reality? She needed evidence of her own sanity, proof that the things she could see and touch were actually there, and not just figments of her imagination.
She wrote to a woman named Erin, whom Shawn had dated when Tara was a teenager. She asked Erin if she had also suffered abuse from Shawn. Tara needed to hear the truth from another source, to learn to trust her own reality once more. Erin shared a story about how Shawn had bashed her head against a brick wall, with such force that she thought he would kill her. To Tara, the story was a lifeline to reality, something tangible she could grasp at a time when her whole world seemed subjective.
She later met a young man who told Tara that he and his grandfather had caught Shawn bashing his cousin’s head into a brick wall. This testimony meant even more to Tara, because it had come from an eyewitness, not a fellow survivor. It was impartial enough for her to vindicate her own memories and experiences.
Tara was once again able to pour herself into her doctoral studies at Harvard. She became interested in the writings of Hume, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, and Mill. She was especially drawn to their ideas that one ought to balance obligations to family with obligations to society.
This had obvious personal resonance for her. She loved her family, but she also knew she had a moral and social duty to stand against their racist, conspiratorial beliefs and their violent, abusive practices.
While she was in Harvard, Gene and Faye abruptly declared that they would be visiting Tara in Boston. She now believes that they were coming to save her, to offer her one final chance at redemption before they would have no choice but to cast her out forever.
While they were in the Northeast, Gene insisted that Tara accompany them on a visit to Palmyra, New York, where, according to the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, the Angel Moroni first appeared and commanded him to found the true church. It is among the holiest sites in the Mormon faith. Gene believed that touching the cross on the temple grounds would cleanse and heal Tara’s troubled soul.
Tara recalls the feeling of wanting to believe, wanting to be cleansed, wanting to be accepted back into the arms of the family she’d once known. But she simply couldn’t do it. When she put her hand on the cross, she felt nothing but cold, lifeless rock.
Later, when they returned to Boston, Gene and Faye oddly and uncomfortably camped out for a week in Tara’s dorm room. It was here that Gene offered to perform a priesthood blessing on Tara. In Mormonism, male heads of the household are given God’s power to act on earth. This gives them the power to cure sickness and cast out demons. With this power, Gene offered to lay his hands on Tara’s head and cast out the demons he believed had strayed her from the true and righteous path.
In a crucial act of defiance, Tara refused the blessing. She remembers her father staring at her in disbelief. He tried to explain to her that the family had been chosen by the Lord and that all the trials they had gone through had been part of His divine plan to test their resolve and reveal to them their true powers.
Faye eagerly affirmed this belief, claiming to Tara that she could now cure strokes and heart attacks through the power of energy. She even claimed that she had cured her own breast cancer (a self-diagnosis of which Tara was completely unaware). Her parents told her that she was a lost cause and had given up all chance of salvation. They left her in Boston.
Her defiance of her father and refusal of his blessing was a watershed moment for Tara. She saw that all of her study, hard work, and intellectual development had led to this moment.
She had to have the positive liberty to experience truths that had been denied her by her father. She needed to use those truths, those observable facts, to form her own thoughts and shape her view of the world. To surrender to her father now, to even pretend to believe in her parents’ healing powers, would be to lose custody of her own mind. She would be giving up her sense of self.
Still, Tara yearned to be part of her family. The heartache of being separated from them was destroying her. She decided to return to Buck’s Peak for one last chance to reconcile. She showed up for a surprise visit. Faye was ecstatic when Tara came through the door. For a moment, Tara felt as though she was still loved, still accepted for who she was.
That was, until she went to the family computer to send an email. She happened to see a previously sent email open in the browser, from Faye to Erin, one of Shawn’s ex-girlfriends. In the email, Faye sang Shawn’s praises as being a changed man who had been reborn and spiritually cleansed. Later in the message, Faye castigated Tara as a liar and a danger to the rest of the family. She said that Tara was lost and without faith.
The message was clear: Faye would never defend Tara and truly believed that the latter was the source of the family’s problems. It was now clear that this was no longer Tara’s home, and hadn’t been for a long time. There was nothing left on Buck’s Peak for Tara, nothing for her to cherish or hold on to.
She made an excuse that she was going to her car to take a drive. As she left, she saw her father, who hugged her and said, “I love you, you know that?” Tara replied, “That has never been the issue.” These were the last words she spoke to her father. She got in her car and drove away—away from Buck’s Peak, and away from her former life.
Tara sank into a prolonged state of deep depression and lethargy. She neglected her studies and took to binge watching hours, days, weeks, and months worth of television shows. She had stopped writing her dissertation and was in genuine danger of failing out of her PhD program. The irony of sacrificing her family for her education only to lose both was not lost on Tara, but she was too mentally broken to continue on.
Eventually, a year passed without Tara having submitted any work to her supervisor. He became concerned and told her that the PhD program was exceptionally demanding and that perhaps she should admit defeat and leave the program.
She was in the depths of true despair. But she was pulled out from it by the person who had been her original inspiration, her first guide into the world of intellectual exploration: her older brother Tyler.
Tyler had come under pressure from Gene, Faye, and Shawn to denounce and excommunicate Tara. He was threatened with ostracism himself if he didn’t fall in line. But, to Tara’s gratitude, Tyler refused. He confronted his father with the litany of Shawn’s abuse and demanded that Gene take action. When Gene did nothing and continued to defend Shawn, Tyler took Tara’s side.
He sent Tara a letter saying that their parents were caught in an endless cycle of abuse, manipulation, and control from which they would never escape. He told Tara that he loved her and that she must remain true to herself. Tyler had refused to forsake his sister.
This was the boost she needed to resume her studies and fulfill her potential. She reinvigorated her PhD research, exploring four intellectual movements from the nineteenth century and how they tackled the problem of family obligation. One of those four intellectual movements was Mormonism.
The day she turned 27, Tara submitted her thesis, “The Family, Morality, and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813-1890.” She successfully defended her thesis, and nearly 10 years to the day after she stepped into a classroom at BYU not even knowing what the Holocaust was, she became Dr. Westover.
She was no longer the child that her father had raised. She had liberated herself, emancipated herself from the mental slavery of her youth. In a word, she was educated.
Work through how you can achieve closure with the past.
Describe a person, place, or experience that you decided to remove from your life. Explain the situation in a few sentences.
Describe a time when someone refused to believe you about something you’d experienced. How did it make you feel?
Going forward, how can you avoid bringing toxic and destructive people into your life?
Think through the major themes and lessons from Educated.
Tara talks a lot about freeing herself from intellectual and emotional slavery. Why do you think education was so important in freeing her from this bondage?
How do you think families perpetuate the cycle of abuse?
As you reflect on Tara’s experiences, how did your own education shape your outlook and make you the person that you are today?