As Tara delves deeper into the world of academia and secures fellowships to study at Cambridge and Harvard, she knows that each degree she earns makes it more impossible for her to ever return to Idaho-where Shawn’s power has grown as her father’s has weakened, and where the women in her family doubt her memories of abuse and shun her for speaking out. She doesn’t know what the Holocaust is, and her dubious personal hygiene-borne out of her family’s belief that germs don’t matter, as God’s will alone determines one’s health-results in tensions with her new, more secular roommates. Once the master of her surroundings on the farm and at the scrapyard, Tara, newly flung into the outside world, is terribly naïve. Although Tara eventually pursues an education and is accepted to the religious but prestigious Brigham Young University, she realizes there is a lot she does not know about the world. As Tara grows older, the abuse she suffers at the hands of her brother Shawn, increasingly destabilized mentally and physically by a series of accidents incurred in their father’s scrap yard, grows worse. She accepts her father’s intense religious beliefs and adopts them as her own, and she, too becomes convinced of the outside world’s corruption. The young Tara is entirely at the mercy of her parents’ paranoias and power struggles. Through the book, she details her father Gene’s Mormon fundamentalist faith and crippling paranoia about the Illuminati’s role in the government and public schooling system, her mother Faye’s dependence on rituals and tinctures to cure oft-injured loved ones, and her brother Shawn’s physical, emotional, and verbal abuse-as well as the suffering, exploitation, and deliberate isolation of her many siblings. Over the course of the memoir, Tara Westover crafts an indelible portrait of her family and of herself. The protagonist and narrator of Educated.
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