Books Written by Tara Westover

One. Educated, a memoir published on 20 February 2018 by Random House in the United States and Hutchinson in Britain. It spent 132 weeks on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list as of September 2020, and won the American Library Association’s Alex Award, the Audie Award for autobiography and the 2018 Goodreads Choice Award for memoir. As of October 2026 there is no second book.

Six. She is the youngest of seven children, with five older brothers and one older sister. In the book they appear as Tony, Shawn, Tyler, Luke, Audrey and Richard. Shawn and Audrey are pseudonyms, as are Gene and Faye for her parents. Three of the seven children went on to earn doctorates: Tara, Tyler and Richard.

There is no public record that she is. Westover keeps her private life out of interviews and has never spoken publicly about a husband. Drew, who appears in the later chapters of Educated, is a boyfriend from her student years. The websites claiming she married him do not cite any interview or official source.

Yes. It is a memoir, her own account of her own life. She was born in Idaho in 1986 into a survivalist family that rejected schools, hospitals and government. Four of the seven children, including her, had no birth certificate, and hers was issued when she was nine. She taught herself enough to enter Brigham Young University and took a doctorate in intellectual history at Cambridge in 2014. Some names in the book are changed. Her parents dispute large parts of the account through their attorney, and her mother has published a counter-memoir. One of her brothers has publicly said there was truth in it.

No. She told Religion News Service in 2018 that she is agnostic and no longer Mormon. She has said that leaving had partly to do with what the faith expected of women, in this life and the afterlife. In the same interview she said she had also met real kindness and self-sacrifice among Mormons.

A childhood in a survivalist, fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho with no schools, no doctors and little contact with the world outside, and the slow self-directed work of getting an education. It is about what that education opened and what it closed. The abuse she documents, largely at the hands of an older brother, and her family’s refusal to acknowledge it run through the whole book. It is about the price of becoming someone your family no longer recognises.

In Clifton, a small farming town in Franklin County in south-east Idaho, at the foot of the mountain she calls Buck’s Peak, about 12 miles from Preston. Her parents still live there. Her mother runs her essential-oils business, Butterfly Express, in Clifton.

She was born on 27 September 1986, so she turned 40 in September 2026. She was 31 when Educated came out in February 2018.

Teaching and writing. Bard College announced in August 2026 that she joins as Visiting Writer in Residence from the autumn. Her most recent published piece is the essay “A Visit to Madam Bedi” in The New Yorker, February 2025. She said in 2022 that she had started a second book, but nothing has been announced.

Only at a distance. In January 2023 the Deseret News reported that she was in touch with her parents by email but not in person. That same month she came, unannounced, to her paternal grandfather’s funeral. Her brothers Tyler and Richard have stayed close to her as well as to their parents. She has described what she chose as forgiveness without reconciliation: you can love someone, miss them, and still choose not to have them in your life.

She said so in February 2022. In an interview with Bustle she confirmed she had begun writing again and described the subject as coming to terms with a background like hers and figuring out what to do with it, adding that she was just starting. Since then no title, publisher or publication date has been announced, and neither her own website nor Penguin Random House lists a forthcoming title.

Brigham Young University, where she took a BA in 2008 with University Honors, then Trinity College, Cambridge on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She was a visiting fellow at Harvard in 2010, in the middle of her doctorate, and returned to Harvard in 2019 as Rosenthal Writer in Residence and a Shorenstein Fellow. Cambridge awarded her PhD in intellectual history in 2014.

The Random House hardcover has 352 pages. The book opens with a prologue and has 40 chapters, divided into three parts.

No. It was a finalist in two categories, Autobiography and the John Leonard Prize for a first book, and won neither. The 2018 Autobiography award went to Nora Krug for Belonging and the John Leonard Prize to Tommy Orange for There There. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The awards it did win are the Alex Award, the Audie and the Goodreads Choice Award.

No. No adaptation has been announced, optioned or released. Westover signed with the agency CAA in July 2020, which was reported as representation rather than as any adaptation deal. Trailers circulating online are fan-made.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the closest parallel and the most commonly recommended. The Last Days by Ali Millar (2022) is the nearest structural match if it was the leaving-a-belief-system part that held you. Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer explains the religious world Educated assumes you know. Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Becoming by Michelle Obama and Know My Name by Chanel Miller are the other three worth your time.