Author Tara Westover On What It Means To Be 'Educated'

One book that’s on most “best of the year” lists — including that of Time magazine, Bill Gates and the Obamas — is Tara Westover‘s “Educated.” In the memoir, Westover recounts growing up in and ultimately leaving behind an extreme survivalist Mormon family in Idaho.

She and her siblings had no friends and no formal schooling. Everyone suffered terrible injuries in their dad’s junkyard. No medical treatment was allowed. One brother beat her and called her a whore, while her mother looked the other way. Another brother encouraged her to get out. She did.

Westover taught herself algebra, aced the entrance exams and went from Brigham Young University to the University of Cambridge in England, and then to Harvard University.

“I never really think about counterfactuals,” Westover () tells ‘s Robin Young, on what might have happened if she was raised differently. “People have asked me, would I really want to, if I could, would I just want to go back and have lived a different life, and … been born to normal parents and gone to school. And I kind of feel like to wish that in