Book Club Guide

Educated

by Tara Westover · 2018 · Biography & Memoir

Key themes

The self that is built without the tools you were denied
Memory, loyalty and the cost of telling your family's story
Education as liberation — and as a loss of the world you came from

About this book

A woman raised off-grid by survivalist parents finds her way to a PhD; an astonishing memoir of self-invention.

Published in 2018, Educated spent over three years on the New York Times bestseller list and sold over five million copies. Westover has largely declined to characterise the memoir as either true or false, allowing the book to exist as a document of her experience.

Discussion questions

Westover acknowledges that her memory may be imperfect and that her family disputes her account. How does this epistemic uncertainty — a memoir that admits it might be wrong — affect your reading of it?
Her parents' world is paranoid and sometimes abusive, but it is also coherent and loving in its own way. How does Westover hold both truths — and does she ask you to condemn them?
The title is Educated, but what Westover gains from education is as much psychological as academic. What exactly does education give her that her upbringing denied?
The cost of leaving is real and ongoing — she loses much of her family. How does Westover present this loss — as inevitable, as a choice that was made for her, or as something she still grieves?
Educated was a global phenomenon, spending years on bestseller lists. What does it speak to in its readers — what need or recognition does it answer?