Educated By Tara Westover: An Analysis

Bucks Peak, 2011, Tara helps her mom deliver a baby on the mountain she lives on. In the middle of nowhere Idaho, Tara lives with a family of fundamentalists. The nearby hospital has never been used by the family members and they plan to keep it that way. In the memoir Educated by Tara Westover, she shares her childhood- a childhood without an education. This essay will analyze how the bible influenced her education and how her father critiqued her clothing. In Tara's life the bible plays such a major role. Her dad preaches it. She abides by it. She believes everything she does is Gods doing, even the ACT score she worked so hard to achieve, “Sometimes I was sure God wanted me to go to college, because He’d given me that twenty-eight. Other times I was sure I’d be rejected, and that God would punish me for applying” (Westover 148). She doesn’t want to let down God or let her family down by leaving. This impacts her so much that she doesn’t know what she wants to do. She is so stressed out about her college test score that ultimately the bible had a negative impact on her education.

She has always lived by his strict rules and done as he says without question, never wanting to disappoint. She also listens to his commentary: in church once, Gene said “That hemline was three inches above Lori’s knee, what’s a woman thing when she puts on a dress like that?” (Westover 113) As a 16-year-old she is now worried about what to wear, worried about her changing body. After another incident, her father told her to roll down her t-shirt sleeves. She didn’t roll them down, thinking “I didn’t feel much like an object of desire or temptation. I felt like a human forklift. How could an inch of skin matter?” (Westover 136) Her dad controlled so much of her life, controlling what she wore just adds to her fear of disappointment. It makes her feel guilty, and upset because she doesn’t know what to