Tara Westover

Tara Westover (born September 1986) is an American memoirist, essayist and historian best known for her internationally bestselling memoir, Educated. The book was shortlisted for two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award (the John Leonard Award, the Autobiography Award), long listed for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence, and won the Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir & Autobiography. It was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and also for PEN America's grand prize, the Jean Stein Book Award. The New York Times named Educated one of the 10 Best Books of 2018. 2Early life Westover was born in a small Idaho farming town (population 234). Her parents were Mormon Fundamentalists following a self-sufficient lifestyle who were skeptical of public schools, doctors and hospitals, and the federal government. As a result, Westover was born at home, delivered by a midwife, and she never visited a doctor or nurse. Her father’s ideology forbade all pharmaceutical interventions, which meant that Westover and her siblings were not taken to the doctor even for injuries sustained while working in their father’s junkyard. Instead, the children were treated at home by their mother who had studied herbalism and other methods of alternative healing. Because of the way her family lived, Westover was not registered for a birth certificate until she was nine years old, and by that time neither she nor her parents were certain of her exact birth dat