Educated

Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalist parents in the mountains of rural Idaho, she grew up without a birth certificate, without school, and without doctors — her father distrusted the government and modern medicine, and the family spent its days preparing for the end of the world and working in a dangerous scrapyard.

Educated is Westover's account of how she taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to win a place at university, and of the widening gulf that opened between the person she was becoming and the family she left behind. From Brigham Young University she went on to Cambridge and a doctorate — an education that gave her the tools to understand her own past, including the violence and denial that fractured her family.

Honest and unsparing, this bestselling memoir is about the price and the promise of self-invention: how learning can remake a mind, and how hard it is to hold on to those you love when you can no longer share their version of reality.