Finalist for PEN/America's Jean Stein Award.Finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Biography.Finalist for the Autobiography Award from the National Book Critics Circle.Finalist for the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle.Named the Book of the Year by the American Booksellers Association.Westover's book earned her several awards, and other recognition. Westover has not responded directly to these claims, but according to the book's acknowledgements, prior to publication it was professionally fact-checked by Ben Phelan of This American Life and GQ. Blake Atkin, a lawyer representing Westover's parents, claims that Educated creates a distorted picture of the parents. Through their attorney, the family has disputed some elements of Westover's book, including her suggestion that her father may have bipolar disorder and that her mother may have suffered a brain injury that resulted in reduced motor skills. As of December 2020, Educated has sold more than 8 million copies. 1 Library Reads pick by American librarians, and in August 2019, it had been checked out more frequently than any other book through all New York Public Library's 88 branches. 1 New York Times bestseller, and was positively reviewed by the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, Vogue, and The Economist, among others.Īs of February 2020, Educated has spent two years in hardcover on the New York Times bestseller list and is being translated into 45 languages. In 2018, Penguin Random House published Westover's Educated: A Memoir, which tells the story of her struggle to reconcile her desire for education and autonomy with her family's rigid ideology and isolated life. She was selected as a Senior Research Fellow at HKS for Spring 2020. Rosenthal Writer in Residence at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School. Westover wrote about the estrangement, and her unusual path to and through university education in her 2018 memoir, Educated. Her parents denied her account and suggested that Westover was under the influence of Satan. In 2009, while a graduate student at Cambridge, Westover told her parents that for many years (since age 15), she had been physically and psychologically abused by an older brother. Her thesis is entitled "The Family, Morality and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890".
She returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, where she earned a doctorate in intellectual history in 2014. She then earned a Master's degree from the University of Cambridge at Trinity College as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2010. After a difficult first year, in which Westover struggled to adjust to academia and the wider society there, she became more successful and graduated with honors in 2008. She gained admission to Brigham Young University and was awarded a scholarship, although she had no high school diploma. She purchased textbooks and studied independently in order to score well on the ACT Exam. There were few textbooks in their house.Īs a teenager, Westover began to want to enter the larger world and attend college. But she never attended a lecture, wrote an essay, or took an exam. Westover has said an older brother taught her to read, and she studied the scriptures of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even when seriously injured, the children were treated only by their mother, who had studied herbalism and other methods of alternative healing.Īll the siblings were loosely homeschooled by their mother. Their father resisted getting formal medical treatment for any of the family. She was not registered for a birth certificate until she was nine years old. Westover was born at home, delivered by a midwife, and was never taken to a doctor or nurse. Her parents were suspicious of doctors, hospitals, public schools, and the federal government. She has five older brothers and an older sister. Westover was the youngest of seven children born in Clifton, Idaho (population 259) to Mormon survivalist parents.
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