Tara Westover, the author of this memoir, had a variety of good reason to want to leave the Idaho mountainside where she was raised along with six siblings by her Mormon parents.

One of  the reasons was the beatings she received from an abusive brother. Another was the meagerness of the home-schooling offered only occasionally in her home. On top of all, her parents’ form of Mormonism was radical, and, for this family, the government was always going to invade and the End of Days was always at hand.

Westover taught herself enough to take the ACT and got into college, though once there she had to ask a professor what the Holocaust was. She persevered and went on to earn a PhD. in history from  Cambridge University.

Westover has said she wrote Educated to be the story she wanted to read when she was separating from her family:

I became aware of how important stories are in telling us how to live—how we should feel, when we should feel proud, when we should feel ashamed. I was losing my family, and it seemed to me that there were no stories about what to do when loyalty to your family was somehow in conflict with loyalty to yourself. And forgiveness. I wanted a story about forgiveness that did not conflate forgiveness with reconciliation, or did not treat reconciliation as the highest form of forgiveness. In my life, I knew the two might always be separate. I didn’t know if I would ever reconcile with my family, and I needed to believe that I could forgive, regardless.