Educated: Chapter 39 Summary & Analysis

Tara arrives home for the first time in years as spring comes to the mountain—the Princess atop Buck’s Peak is brighter than Tara has ever seen her. The Princess has been “haunting” Tara for weeks, “beckoning” from across the ocean. Tara has been worried that the Princess is “angry” with her for leaving, but sees now that she isn’t and never was—leaving, the Princess teaches, is a part of life.

Tara visits Grandma-over-in-town and Grandpa-over-in-town. Grandma is in the throes of Alzheimer’s and doesn’t recognize Tara, so Tara spends some time catching up with Grandpa. He tells Tara that her parents have become the most “powerful people in the valley,” renowned for the money they’ve made from the essential oil business. Even Grandpa has become convinced that God must be behind their “wondrous success.”

Tara is planning on going to Tyler’s in Idaho Falls next, but writes her mother a quick email asking if she wants to meet up in town. Tara says she’s not ready to see Dad, but misses Mother after so many years apart. Mother replies with an ultimatum: Tara can see her and Dad together, or she will never see her mother again. Tara writes that as of the publication of her memoir her mother has “never recanted” this demand.

Tara is determined to lay eyes on her home before she leaves the valley, so she drives to the foot of Buck’s Peak. As she looks up the hill at the house, she sees how enormous it has grown in the wake of her parents’ many expansions. Tara wonders if her parents are using their money to continue preparations for the End of Days, and imagines Dad dragging solar panels and gallons of gas and water across the lawn.

Several months later, when Grandma-over-in-town dies, Tara returns to Idaho for the funeral. She visits Faye’s sister Angie who lives next door to Grandma and Grandpa-over-in-town. Angie, too, has been “cast aside” by the family after being fired from the family business and seeking unemployment, igniting Dad’s paranoid beliefs that she was trying to put him on some sort of government watchlist. Tara and Angie bond over their shared ostracism, and at the funeral, Tara spends time with the other “outcasts” in her family—her mother’s other sister Debbie, as well as Tyler and Stefanie.

At the funeral, Tara sits apart from most of her family. She catches glimpses of Luke and his giant “brood” of children; Richard, who has recently written to apologize for believing Dad over Tara, and offering her his support; Audrey, who clutches Tara’s arm and tells her that to refuse to see Dad is a “great sin”; and at last Shawn, who does not look at Tara once during the service. As Tara gazes over her fractured family, she notices that the three siblings with educations—herself, Richard, and Tyler—have effectively split from the rest.