Educated

by

Tara Westover

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Themes and Colors
Memory, History, and Subjectivity Theme Icon
Learning and Education Theme Icon
Devoutness and Delusion Theme Icon
Family, Abuse, and Entrapment Theme Icon
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

“My strongest memory is not a memory,” begins Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated. Though the book is a carefully written history of Westover’s childhood of growing up in a family of Mormon fundamentalists, she admits outright that memory is tricky and subjective—and therefore, she argues, so is the history of one’s life and one’s family. Throughout the book, Westover argues that both personal memory and family history are subjective things, perceived differently by different…

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Learning and Education

Growing up the child of a Mormon fundamentalist with paranoid, extremist views—possibly exacerbated by bipolar disorder—Tara Westover was denied access to an education. Her father, Gene, believed that the American government used public schools to deliberately “brainwash” children, and refused to let his younger children attend school. Instead of receiving a formal education, Tara grew up studying the Bible, helping her mother mix and bless homemade herbal tinctures, and working alongside her older…

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Devoutness and Delusion

Though Tara Westover states in a short preface to Educated that her book is “not [a story] about Mormonism” or any other religious belief, it remains undeniable that much of the memoir concerns the work Westover had to do throughout her life to delineate the line between devoutness and delusion within her own family. Her father’s anti-government, self-sufficient, end-times outlook on life was radical, hateful, and dangerous, and was rooted in fear. He also…

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Family, Abuse, and Entrapment

The stifling, claustrophobic home in which Tara Westover comes of age is marked by physical, emotional, and psychological abuse—an insidious triad that serves to entrap the members of the Westover clan, keep them vulnerable, and cause them to question whether what’s happening to them is really abuse after all, or just the normal way families treat one another. As Westover looks back on the ways in which she, her mother, and her siblings all…

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