Tara Westover was the youngest of seven children raised on a mountain in Idaho by parents who distrusted the government, public schools and hospitals. Her father, convinced the world was about to end, stockpiled supplies and put his children to work in his scrapyard, where serious injuries were treated with her mother's herbal remedies rather than at a hospital. Tara had no birth certificate until she was nine.
At seventeen, having never attended a classroom, she taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to pass the ACT and enrol at Brigham Young University. There she heard of the Holocaust for the first time and began to see her upbringing from the outside. Scholarships took her to Cambridge and Harvard, and she earned a doctorate in history.
The heart of the memoir is less about academic success than about the cost of change. Westover writes about a violent older brother, the pull of family loyalty, and the struggle to trust her own memory when relatives remember events differently. Her clear, unsentimental prose made the book a long-running bestseller.
Book details
| Author | Tara Westover |
|---|---|
| First published | 2018 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Memoir |
| Type | Non-fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 334 |
| Setting | Rural Idaho, Utah and Cambridge, England |
Themes
- Education
- Family loyalty
- Abuse
- Self-invention
- Memory
Who should read it
Readers moved by stories of self-transformation and anyone wrestling with the pull between family and personal growth.
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