Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Educated, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, History, and Subjectivity
Learning and Education
Devoutness and Delusion
Family, Abuse, and Entrapment
Summary
Analysis
Tara returns home to Idaho in the fall—Grandma-down-the-hill is dying. Drew picks Tara up at the airport and drives her to the hospital where Grandma is staying. Grandma is happy to see Tara, and after their short visit, Drew drives Tara to Buck’s Peak. The house is in chaos—Mother’s kitchen is filled with her all-female employee force who don’t recognize Tara and try to keep her from entering the house. When Tara at last finds Mother, she thinks she looks like “a celebrity in a crowded restaurant,” surrounded by people desperate to talk to her. To escape the madness, Tara takes Drew for a walk on the mountain. By the time they get back to the house, things are somber and still—the hospital called to say that Grandma has died.
At home, Tara sees just how rapidly things are changing for her family. Mother’s business is booming, and she’s selling a vision of organic, faith-based healing to everyone around her—while Dad’s mother languishes alone in a hospital with no visitors because most of her family is paranoid and delusional about the medical profession.
Themes
Dad slips into an angry depression, deflated and sad but still cruel and coarse to everyone around him. Even though Mother’s business is bustling and in need of help, Dad only leaves the bed to speak at Grandma-down-the-hill’s funeral—he delivers a twenty-minute sermon on God and Abraham, and mentions his mother only twice. After the service, as Mother chides Dad for refusing to write the thank-you cards and passing them off to her when she has important business matters to attend to, the two of them get into a horrible fight.
Dad’s narcissism, cruelty, and paranoia only increase after the death of his mother. Tara’s own mother, unable to handle his prideful, stubborn childishness at last stands up to him in a cataclysmic show of force.
Themes
The next morning, Tara is surprised to see Dad in the kitchen trying to make pancakes. It is the first time she’s ever seen him attempt to cook anything. Worried, she goes to check on Mother, who is in the bathroom, wrapped in a towel and sobbing. The two women embrace each other.
Tara and her mother have both been broken down over the years by Dad’s delusions and cruelty. When Tara encounters her mother in a vulnerable, miserable state, she doesn’t know what to do but approach her as an equal and try to comfort her.
Themes
