The first time Tara Westover, author of the memoir Educated, heard about the Holocaust, she was seventeen years old and sitting in her first semester of school at Brigham Young University. It wasn’t just her first semester of college—she had never, before that week, been in a school classroom, nor had she ever read anything at home that wasn’t a religious text. Sitting in her lecture on Western art, she sees the unfamiliar word, Holocaust, in italics under an image in her textbook. “I don’t know this word,” she tells her professor during class. “What does it mean?”
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The silence, she says, was almost violent. “Thanks for that,” he tells her, and returns to his lecture. On this first day of Westover’s formal education, she spends considerable time in the computer lab after class teaching herself about the horrors of the Holocaust.
Westover’s riveting Educated has definitely caught the collective imagination. Books + Publishing. A dazzling example of what you can achieve if you set your mind to something. An inspirational, truly unique coming-of-age tale. A powerful book. Ellen DeGeneres. Tara Westover is the author of “Educated.” Westover recently spoke about her memoir and took questions from a virtual audience during an event held by Utah Valley University.
This gap in her knowledge illustrates her family’s attitude toward schooling perfectly. Westover grew up in a Mormon survivalist family on a mountain in southeastern Idaho called Buck’s Peak. She was born some time near the end of September in 1986, but her mother didn’t request a birth certificate for her until she was nine years old. There was no need for one without school. Her father’s paranoia about government interference is the family’s framework and the reason for their isolation: they can’t go to school or the doctor because those institutions are run by “the Feds”; the End of Days is always a threat.
“Learning in our family was entirely self-directed,” she says early on. Westover learned to read, but not much else. She taught herself algebra for the ACTs before attending college at BYU and graduate school at Cambridge and Harvard. Her emotional education, the bright center of her transformation in Educated, is also delayed, atypical. In her adult life, she has to unlearn all that she grew up believing about what it meant to be a good woman.
Westover’s father, who works in the scrap yard, casts a long shadow over this book. He often brings his seven children to work to help him, where he’s reckless with their safety as well as his own—several of them sustain debilitating injuries that their mother, the owner of a successful herbal healing business, just can’t treat, including head injuries, a burned leg, and deep gashes. The accidents are so gruesome and commonplace it’s a wonder the siblings make it to adulthood.
Westover’s father also believes—and convinces others to believe—that he has prophetic powers, which permit his abusive behavior and excuse it in others. Westover’s older brother Shawn (a pseudonym) sadistically tortures Westover throughout her adolescence, but when she confronts her parents about it, they equivocate, effectively gaslighting her and plunging her into her greatest journey towards education: learning to trust her own memories and instincts.
It’s not until another older brother encourages her to study for the ACTs and apply to Brigham Young University, the Mormon college in Utah, that she sees the open door to the rest of the world, one in which she can leave the mountain and live differently from the family that raised her. She begins reading. The only books in her home are the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and texts by Mormon prophets, but: “The skill I was learning was a crucial one,” she says, “the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”
Of course, we know how the story ends. The book would not exist had Westover stayed captive to her family’s paranoia and dysfunction. But the pleasure of Educated is in seeing her journey unfold. With each lecture she attends in college, she widens the fault line between her own voracious hunger to let the world in and her family’s desperate attempts to keep it out. Her professors notice her brilliance, and she lands spots at Cambridge and Harvard for graduate study.
“Part of me will always believe … that my father’s words ought to be my own,” she admits. Several members of her family say they believe her story of her brother’s abuse but then change their minds. “Talking to you,” her mother writes her, “your reality is so warped. It’s like talking to someone who wasn’t even there.”
She makes friends who discuss feminism as a political and social ideology rather than use it as an insult, she travels to Rome, Paris, and Jordan, she falls in love, goes to therapy. She embraces the wideness of the world, and yet, even as a well-educated adult, she cannot separate herself from the family that so misunderstands and abuses her. Even with a PhD, Westover lives, she says, “the life of a lunatic. Seeing sunshine, I suspected rain. I felt a relentless desire to ask people to verify whether they were seeing what I was seeing. Is this book blue? I wanted to ask. Is that man tall?”
Without anyone to confirm, Westover is left with her biggest educational project yet: to learn how to depend on her own mind. Her redemption comes in untangling her own roots from her family’s. Leaving, she finds, offers no middle ground. She wrenches herself free using her formal schooling and its promise of something different and more nourishing. Westover’s education is complete when she cannot go back to the ignorance she lived in before her enlightenment. “Who writes history?” she asks herself the day she finishes a draft of her dissertation. “I do.”
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Who is Shawn Westover? What is Shawn’s relationship with his sister Tara like? And why doesn’t Tara Westover reveal his real name?
Shawn Westover is the fictitious name Tara Westover gives to one of her brothers in her memoir Educated.
We’ll look at Shawn Westover’s relationship with the author and cover parts of Educated that might indicate why Tara chose not to reveal Shawn’s real name, even though she used the real names of at least three of her four other brothers.
Tara Gets to Know Shawn Westover
In the weeks following a car crash, Tara experienced great difficulty moving her neck. Her mother’s homeopathic treatments and energy healing did nothing to alleviate her pain.
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It was at this time that a figure with whom she’d had little previous contact entered her life: her older brother Shawn Westover. Being the youngest, Tara had a minimal relationship with Shawn up to this point, as he had left the family home at 17 to pursue work in trucking and welding. He had now returned home after many years of being away. Shawn had an unsavory reputation in the community, being well-known as a bully, brawler, and all-around provocateur.
Tara soon had her own firsthand experience with Shawn’s volatility when he, without warning, put his hands around her head and violently twisted it—to help pop her neck back into place following the accident, or so he claimed. This harsh “treatment” actually did help: Tara could once again pivot her neck. But his non-consensual laying of hands on Tara foreshadowed what was to come between the two siblings. Tara would spend much of the rest of her time on Buck’s Peak subject to Shawn’s displays of kindness, which were all too often followed by displays of terrifying cruelty and violence.
Other warning signs of Shawn’s unstable and combative personality soon emerged. When he would drive her to rehearsals at the theater, Shawn would bait and bully Tara’s friends there. He would flick off their hats or knock soda out of their hands, to dominate and humiliate them.
The Long-Haul Trucking Trip
Shortly after Shawn Westover came back home, he invited Tara to come along with him on a long-haul trucking job down the West Coast. Tara agreed, excited by the possibility of travel and the opportunity to spend time with this mysterious older brother about whom she knew so little.
The trip was hazardous from the start: Shawn was operating on little sleep and even faked the reports at inspection points to make it look like he was getting more rest than he actually was. The more menacing side of his personality also presented itself to Tara. One night, he decided to teach her martial arts, explaining to her how to inflict maximum damage and pain on one’s opponent with only two fingers. He also showed her techniques like how to throw her full body weight behind a punch and crush someone’s windpipe. Clearly, Shawn had an appetite for violence.
But Tara was still enjoying the time with her brother. She recalls passing the time with him by playing elaborate word games, learning trucker lingo, eating junk food, and playing video games—all new experiences for her. The undercurrent of violence was there, but had not yet fully surfaced.
Shawn’s Girlfriend Sadie
Tara was also learning that Shawn could be emotionally abusive, especially to women and girls. He’d become acquainted with a girl named Sadie who was involved in the same theater as Tara. Sadie had a crush on Shawn Westover, and he used that leverage to manipulate and psychologically torture this girl every chance he got.
If he saw her speaking with another boy, Shawn would give Sadie the cold shoulder and refuse to speak to her. Other times, he would force her to buy items for him, only to change his mind and chastise her for bringing him the wrong thing. He would repeat this exercise with her several times over the course of a given night.
Eventually, Sadie began altering her behavior to appease Shawn’s volatile personality. She even demanded that boys at school stop walking next to her, lest Shawn see them when he picked her up after school.
Shawn Westover’s First Assault on Tara
Eventually, it would be Tara’s turn to be a direct recipient of Shawn’s wrath. One day, Shawn Westover ordered her to fetch him a glass of water, and threatened not to drive her into town the next day if she didn’t comply. Perhaps tired of his bossiness, Tara dumped the glass on his head. Shawn’s reaction was swift and brutal.
Is Educated A True Memoir
He chased Tara down the hallway and demanded she apologize. When she refused, he lifted her off the ground by her hair, dragged her into the bathroom, and pushed her head into the toilet.
He then used on her one of the same torture techniques he had taught her on their recent road trip: twisting her wrist and pushing it in a spiral against her inner forearm, causing excruciating pain.
Accusations of Indecency
Tara turned 15 in September 2001. She was now fully in puberty, which brought increased attention to her body and new efforts by the men in her life to control her sexuality.
She recalls her body changing at this time as she reached sexual maturity. Most of all, the full weight of her family’s highly patriarchal and often misogynistic views on women, marriage, and sexuality soon began to press upon Tara.
Shawn Westover began to shame Tara for her alleged acts of impropriety. He harshly chastised her for her friendship with Charles, a young man she met at the theatre, telling Tara that she was developing a reputation for being “that kind of girl.” He also started calling her a “whore” for wearing makeup and lip gloss. One night, as punishment, Shawn forced his youngest sister to walk home for 12 miles in the sub-zero conditions of an Idaho winter.
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The abuse only continued as Tara got deeper into her teen years. One morning, she woke up to a blinding pain of what felt like needles in her brain and throat. It dawned on her that Shawn was astride her, choking her with both hands, while screaming “Slut!” and “Whore!” It was only through the intervention of her mother and Tyler that Tara survived the assault.
Yet Shawn could also be fiercely protective of Tara. This protectiveness, too, may have been rooted in Shawn’s need for dominance and control (and his patriarchal notions about needing to “guard” women), but it was certainly a part of his overall behavior toward his sister.
For example, Tara recalls Shawn standing up to Gene and physically threatening him when he saw that Gene had tried to force Tara to operate a dangerous hydraulic metal-cutting tool at the junkyard. Indeed, Shawn was the only one who could stand up to Gene on a consistent basis—and win.
Tara’s feelings toward Shawn were complicated. On the one hand, he was a violent abuser who seemed to have little regard for the physical and emotional safety of others. On the other hand, however, she did enjoy a special bond with him.
Shawn Westover’s Second Assault
Tara came home from her sophomore year of college for Thanksgiving. Her friend Charles joined the Westovers for dinner for the holiday. It would be an evening Tara would never forget. Shawn Westover was in a particularly hostile mood at dinner, making cruel and snide remarks to Tara and Charles. When Tara told Shawn not to touch her after he jabbed one of his fingers into her ribs, the situation rapidly escalated out of control.
Shawn pinned her down to the floor (just out of view of everyone else), cutting off airflow through her windpipe. Later on in the evening, he gut-punched her as she was bringing dinner rolls to the table. When Tara protested again (her resistance was obviously a trigger for him), Shawn once more pinned Tara to the floor and dragged her to the bathroom, where he shoved her face into the toilet. In the course of this attack, Tara broke her toe. This time, the assault was in full view of the family—and Charles.
Tara hated the idea of Charles seeing her in this state—as a victim, a helpless pawn of Shawn’s. So she tried to present it as a game, in which Shawn was only playfully roughhousing with her and there was no need to worry. She even made a point of laughing throughout her assault, to give off the impression that everything was just a joke, happening with her full consent.
Charles was deeply disturbed by the incident and by Tara’s refusal to acknowledge what had really happened. He parted ways with her, telling Tara that she was the only one who could rescue herself from her family.
Shawn Westover’s Final Assault
Shawn would attack Tara on one more occasion. When she was back home a few weeks later for Christmas, she was out driving with Shawn Westover when they happened upon Charles’ car in the parking lot of the local gas station. Shawn, with cunning instinct, immediately recognized that Tara didn’t want Charles to see her with Shawn, especially since she was covered in soot and grime from the junkyard. Shawn, of course, saw an opportunity to inflict maximum humiliation and emotional trauma on his younger sister. He demanded that she accompany him inside.
Educated Westover Discussion Questions
When she refused, he snapped. He dragged her out of the car and pinned her face-down onto the asphalt parking lot, breaking her wrist and ankle in the process. This attack was in public, so there were plenty of onlookers (though thankfully not Charles).
Tara retreated into the same defensive shell that she’d used during the Thanksgiving attack the month before: she pretended that it was all a joke. She made a public show of laughing as Shawn paraded her through the store at the gas station, in front of the people who’d witnessed the attack in the parking lot just minutes before. She ignored the pain from her wrist and ankle.
Westover Educated Crossword
When they returned home, Tara went to her room to write about the experience in her diary. She couldn’t understand why Shawn did these things to her, even when she’d told him not to touch her and had begged him to stop. Later, Shawn came into her room with an ice pack and told her that she should always feel free to tell him if his “fun and games” went too far. In other words, she was responsible for not having stopped him. He was gaslighting her, denying her reality, and making her think that she had imagined the entire encounter as being more violent than it really was. It was, yet again, classic abuser behavior.
Tara had long convinced herself that Shawn’s violence was her fault—that if she’d just asked Shawn to stop in the right way, he would have. This night, however, she wrote about the experience in her diary plainly and honestly, without resorting to vague or euphemistic language. It was one of her first steps toward recognizing what Shawn truly was—and recognizing, also, how her family had implicitly condoned his abuse.
Years later, as a survivor, Tara would understand why she had come to believe that Shawn’s emotional manipulation had all been her fault. She saw that it was more comforting to accept the abuse as stemming from a flaw in herself, rather than in him—because if it was her defect, she would at least be able to control it. She was displaying a common symptom of abuse victims, that of sympathizing with their abuser or rationalizing away the abuse they suffer.
Shawn Westover’s abuse of Tara may indicate why she chose to give him a fictitious name in her memoir.
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- How Tara Westover was abused by her brother as a child
- Why Tara's parents set up the children for failure
- How Tara ultimately broke out of her parents' grasp and succeeded for herself