No one taught her this

She made it out. But she kept wanting to go back—back to a home where her life wasn't something she truly lived, but something she was told how to experience, especially by her father. Tara Westover's memoir Educated is a moving story of a young woman born in rural Idaho, on a rural mountain called Buck's Peak, who breaks free from a cycle of emotional and physical abuse that defined her childhood.

Tara received her first formal education at the age of 17—before that, her intellectual development was grossly neglected under the guise of "homeschooling," which her mother only loosely, if ever, attended to. Raised in a household where formal schooling, modern medicine, and government institutions were treated with deep suspicion, Tara and her siblings were thrust into a dangerous way of living. From an early age, they helped their father in his junkyard, operating heavy and risky machinery without proper protection. The injuries were brutal, the near-death experiences far too frequent. As I read, I ached for the young Tara. I found myself anticipating the worst, just as she did, with every turn of the page.

The only glimmers of joy come when Tara begins to achieve something, yet even these moments are shadowed by self-doubt and guilt. Her victories are hard-won, but she cannot fully embrace them. Her education—her path to freedom—feels like a betrayal of the very people who denied her that freedom to begin with. The reading experience is powerful, but at times painful. You want to celebrate her triumphs, but she herself struggles to.

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Tara's memoir is not just another coming-of-age story. It's a reckoning—with memory, with identity, and with the idea of freedom itself. She opens her story with a line that lingers: "My strongest memory is not a memory. It's something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened." What follows is an intimate exploration of her internal conflict—the tug-of-war between the life she knew and the world she would discover through books and the guidance of academic mentors.

She repeatedly questions her reality. Was the abuse she endured from her brother and father real, or did she imagine it? Her struggle with truth is unsettling—made worse by the fact that it's her own family gaslighting her. The abuse is always framed as discipline, always "for her own good," so she doesn't grow up immodest or unacceptable in their Mormon way of life. Her mother, despite becoming the financial backbone of their home, continues to bow to her husband's will. As Tara studies mental illness at university, her father's erratic behavior starts to make a different kind of sense. Perhaps, she wonders, he is bipolar. But in a home ruled by certainty, there was never room for diagnosis—only doctrine.

She writes, "My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs"—until the moment it finally does.

One of the memoir's most striking elements is Westover's refusal to paint her family in simple black and white. She writes with compassion, even when writing about betrayal. And this is worrying—what is the extent of forgiveness, one might wonder, as I did when her brother threatened to kill her.

Tara ends her narrative with these lines, which I found striking: "You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education."

This is not just a story about personal triumph. It's a deeply unsettling and honest meditation on what it takes to break away from the only version of truth you've ever known. It asks difficult, lingering questions—about what we inherit, what we reject, and whether education can really mend what was broken at the root. Educated doesn't offer easy answers. But it does offer hope. And clarity. And, perhaps most importantly, permission to find one's voice—even if it shakes everything that came before.

Rifat Islam Esha occasionally writes for Star Books and Literature.