Educated

Author/Guide: Tara Westover

Why a Booktrail?

ISBN: 978-0099511021
Genre: Autobiography/memoirs

What you need to know before your trail

Tara Westover and her family grew up preparing for the End of Days but, according to the government, she didn’t exist. She hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she’d never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn’t believe in hospitals.

As she grew older, her father became more radical and her brother more violent. At sixteen, Tara knew she had to leave home. In doing so she discovered both the transformative power of education, and the price she had to pay for it.

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“This story is not about Mormonism. Neither is it about any other kind of religious belief. In in there are many kinds of people, some believers, some not; some kind, some not. The author disputes any kind of correlation, positive or negative, between the two.”

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”