4 Shocking Truths About Survival, a review of Tara Westover’s ‘Educated’

Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, has been met with near-universal acclaim, celebrated as an astonishing story of a young woman’s triumph over a brutal and isolating childhood in rural Idaho. While it is undoubtedly an inspirational tale of survival, to frame it merely as such is to miss its most profound and unsettling lessons. The book’s power lies not just in the physical hardships Westover endures, but in the psychological and philosophical battles she wages.

This is not another story about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Instead, Educated interrogates the very foundations of being. Its most profound lessons are the ones that fracture our own comfortable assumptions about family, memory, and the nature of reality itself. Westover’s memoir exposes four surprising truths about violence, learning, and selfhood that challenge our most fundamental beliefs about the world and our place in it.

1. The Abuser Can Also Be the Savior

In most stories, the line between villain and hero is clearly drawn. In Educated, Tara’s older brother, Shawn, erases that line with terrifying and compassionate force. He is not a simple monster; he is a paradox who embodies both Tara’s greatest source of pain and her moments of miraculous salvation. His abuse is brutal and specific: he twists her wrist until the bone is about to snap, shoves her head into a toilet, and relentlessly demeans her with words like “whore” and “slut.”

Yet this is the same brother who saves her life. In one harrowing scene, when Tara’s horse, Bud, runs wild up a mountain, Shawn performs an impossible feat of horsemanship to catch the runaway’s reins, preventing an almost certain fatal fall. In another, after Tara is twice nearly killed by a dangerous machine called the Shear, their father insists she continue working. Shawn intervenes, physically shoving his father and taking her place at the treacherous machine for a month, absorbing the risk himself. He dismantles the simple narrative of victim and villain, revealing the tangled, painful loyalties that bind families together, even in the midst of profound abuse.

This paradox is never more devastating than after a car crash leaves Tara with a crippling neck injury. Shawn, using his brute strength, performs a “violent, compassionate act”: he wraps his hands around her skull and cracks her neck back into place. It is in this moment of salvation delivered through violence that Tara reflects on the psychological projection at the heart of her trauma.

I don’t know what I saw—what creature I conjured from that violent, compassionate act—but I think it was my father, or perhaps my father as I wished he were, some longed-for defender, some fanciful champion, one who wouldn’t fling me into a storm, and who, if I was hurt, would make me whole.

2. Education Isn’t Just Learning; It’s an Act of Rebellion

For most of us, education is a path to opportunity. For Tara Westover, it was an act of profound betrayal. In her family’s isolated world on Buck’s Peak, knowledge from the outside was a corrupting force. Her father, a paranoid survivalist, believed public school was a “ploy by the Government to lead children away from God,” declaring he may as well “surrender my kids to the devil himself” as send them to a classroom. When Tara decided to pursue a college education, he saw it as a spiritual defection, accusing her of “whoring after man’s knowledge instead of God’s.”

This framework recasts her entire academic journey as an act of rebellion. When her brother Tyler becomes the first to leave for college, it’s a quiet defiance. When Tara secretly studies for the ACT, she is not just preparing for a test; she is challenging her father, her family, and their entire worldview. The central conflict of the book is this agonizing choice: to gain an education, to form her own mind and see the world for herself, she must risk losing the only world she has ever known. The ultimate price of this choice is captured in a terrifying moment when her father attempts to perform a priesthood blessing to cast out the “demon” of her new self.

What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.

3. Your Memory Isn’t a Recording; It’s a Reconstruction

A memoir is, by definition, a story of memory. But what happens when the author admits that memory itself cannot be trusted? In a stunning act of intellectual courage, Westover confronts the fallibility of recall, demonstrating that our past is not a static recording but a story we continually reconstruct. She illustrates this most powerfully in the author’s notes, through two conflicting accounts of her brother Luke’s severe burn.

In the first version, Tara’s own memory, she is a ten-year-old girl left alone to handle a crisis, heroically putting Luke’s burned leg into a garbage can filled with water. In the second version, told to her years later by her brother Richard, their father was present the entire time. He carried Luke down the mountain and administered his own homeopathic remedies. By placing this contradiction in the notes, Westover offers a sophisticated meta-commentary on the ethics of storytelling. She never resolves the discrepancy. Instead, she reflects on how the differing details create a “different father, a different man.” It is a brave admission for a memoirist, dismantling the authority of her own narrative to expose a more profound truth: that the past is a story told, not a history recorded.

We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell. This is especially true in families.

4. The Strangest Things Are The Ones Everyone Else Takes for Granted

The most shocking moments in Educated are not always the dramatic scenes of car crashes and violent confrontations. They are often the quiet, jarring moments that reveal Tara’s profound ignorance of what the rest of the world considers mundane reality. This was not merely an absence of knowledge but an “un-education”—a form of indoctrination into a carefully constructed alternate reality, making her journey not just academic, but an epistemological escape.

The examples are as startling as they are revealing:

• As a university student, she has never heard of the Holocaust and innocently asks what it is during a lecture, to the stunned silence of the room.
• She doesn’t understand that she is supposed to read the textbook for her art history class, believing she only needs to look at the pictures.
• She has never taken an ibuprofen, having been taught by her mother that all pharmaceuticals are poisons that “rot you slowly from the inside” and cause birth defects.
• When her grandmother insists she wash her hands after using the toilet, she justifies not using soap with a line learned from her father: “I teach them not to piss on their hands.”

These moments powerfully illustrate the true depth of her isolation. Her journey is not just from the junkyard to the halls of Cambridge; it is a journey from one reality to another, a cultural and social transformation that required her to learn an entire world that the rest of us take for granted.

Conclusion: The Real Meaning of an Education

Educated offers a story far deeper than a simple inspirational tale. Westover reveals how love and violence can become so horrifically entangled that they are indistinguishable; she recasts education not as a peaceful path to enlightenment, but as a brutal act of rebellion waged against one’s own identity; she shows that memory is an act of creation, and that reality itself is a fragile consensus. The book’s ultimate power lies in its redefinition of what it means to be “educated.” It is not about accumulating degrees or accolades. For Tara Westover, it is the painful, difficult, and ultimately liberating process of self-creation—of deciding what to believe, how to see the world, and who to be, even if it costs you everything you have ever known.

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.