Amy Chua, author of ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’, calls Tara Westover “one of the most gifted writers that I’ve read in a very long time”. But, make no mistake, this book ‘educated’ is Tara’s memoir (not a novel) which will leave you wondering how the events listed in it can be true when they seem so impossible. How can a girl born in a Mormon family, with no access to education (and without even a birth certificate!), raised to help out in her father’s junkyard and supposed to marry and bear children without so much as ever stepping foot into a school, eventually end up going to Cambridge and Harvard, and getting a PhD?
I didn’t find a single picture of Tara in this book, not on the covers, nor within the pages. So I went ahead and Googled her. And oh, I also found out we’re both born in the same year. (>_<)
Tara’s life seems more exciting than anything ever seen in Hollywood movies. Her father seems most pious and preoccupied with the End of Days (even burying a thousand gallons of fuel as preparation). Thanks to him, the family also gets into a series of horrific accidents. The first left Tara’s mother with ‘Raccoon Eyes’, which signaled serious brain injury. Yet they did not send her to the hospital because the family did not trust doctors and hospitals, believing that God would heal them instead. Working for her father, Tara herself got injured when a spike of iron pierced through her leg, followed by a fall of about seventeen feet.
Besides a chain of accidents, Tara also had to deal with a possibly mentally ill brother, “Shawn”, who would stick her head into the toilet bowl, twist her arm (till he broke her wrist one day), strangle her, then eventually apologize for whatever he’d done. For some strange reason, Shawn had multiple head injuries from various accidents, but none managed to kill him. It was only much later that Tara realized her sister, “Audrey”, had also suffered in Shawn’s hands. This crazy guy even killed his dog Diego, a German Shepherd, with a small blade instead of a bullet to the head or heart. The poor dog likely died a slow and very painful death.
Another brother, Luke, had his arm “gashed” because of the machine their father brought back and insisted his children work with. Later on, Luke became blind in his left eye after he had been shot in the face with a paintball gun.
And to be fair, apart from causing his family members to suffer injuries, the father also got involved in a horrific accident: an explosion that devastated the lower half of his face and left a hand looking something like a deformed claw.
To me, the family does sometimes seem like hillbillies, the deranged sort we see in horror movies. Yet Tara has her brother, Tyler, whom she dedicates this book to, who helped set her on the path to getting her education.
And it was by no means easy, getting to become Dr Westover. She developed stomach ulcers. And because she was financially strapped, she got a job as a janitor, and even tried to sell her blood for money. Because of what had happened at home, she went on to have a mental breakdown, sleepwalked and often awoke at night standing in the middle of streets, and she also had panic attacks.
What a life! And she’s only in her 30s. Read this book if you want to know how she got to where she is today, and find out what happened to those family members too! 
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“In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.” – Tara Westover