Coming to ETH on Thursday, March 27, 2025!
Doors at 6:30pm | Show starts at 7pm - Moderated by Suzy DeYoung and Lee Shull
Q&A and book signing to follow the speaking engagement. Books are provided by Byrd's Books for pre-purchase and night of the event.
Tara Westover is an American author. Born in Idaho to a father opposed to public education, she never attended school. An older brother taught her to read, and after that her education was erratic and haphazard, with most of her days spent working in her father’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. After that first encounter with education she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008 and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.
In 2018, she published her memoir, Educated, which explores her struggle to reconcile her desire for education and autonomy with her desire to be loyal to her family. Educated was an instant commercial and critical success, debuting at Tara Westover #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and remaining on the list for more than two years.
“This story, remarkable as it is, might be merely another entry in the subgenre of extreme American life, were it not for the uncommon perceptiveness of the person telling it. Westover examines her childhood with unsparing clarity, and, more startlingly, with curiosity and love, even for those who have seriously failed or wronged her. In part, this is a book about being a stranger in a strange land.”
—The New Yorker
“[A] superb memoir...Westover’s journey from a remote corner of the American west to one of the world’s grandest seats of learning is extraordinary, but her educational triumph comes at the terrible cost of relations with her family. Her story, of fighting to be herself, is as old as the hills she came from, but Westover, now 31, gives us such a fresh, absorbing take that it deserves to bring her own private Idaho into the bestseller lists, book groups and, eventually, cinemas.”
—The Times
