Tara’s mother, Faye, learned not to question the rules Gene dictated-because of his outright hatred of doctors, hospitals, and the medical profession, she refused to seek help even when she suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. With so much hate, fear, and paranoia as the baseline of relations within the Westover home, it is no wonder that the members of Tara’s family grew meek, compliant, and subservient in response. Insults, rants, racial epithets, conspiracy theories, and profound isolation from mainstream society and objective truth were all just a way of life within the Westover household-and Gene’s paranoid, violent temperament was the root of the patterns of abuse that would grow and flourish throughout the family in the years to come. This led to patterns of verbal, physical, emotional, and financial abuse meant to cement those mistruths as a common reality shared by all the members of the Westover clan. Tara’s father Gene’s intense religious devoutness centers around delusional beliefs that the “Days of Abomination,” or the events that would mark the end of the world and human civilization, were fast approaching.

As Westover looks back on the ways in which she, her mother, and her siblings all fell prey to their father’s abuse-and how some of her beloved family members became abusers themselves-she argues that abuse within families often becomes normalized, and that this normalization, and the confusion it engenders, perpetuates cycles of entrapment, confinement, and isolation for victims.Īlthough Tara has no trouble looking back on her childhood and recounting certain memories (or at least the way they crystallized in her mind, if not the way they actually happened in real life), it is far more difficult for her to reckon with how delusion, danger, and indeed abuse became so normalized within her family over the years. 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.

Educated by Tara Westover