The University of Tulsa has selected “Educated” by Tara Westover as the 2023 Common Read. Over the summer, all incoming undergraduate students will receive a free copy of this extraordinary memoir along with a welcome letter from President Carson that includes questions, ideas, and creative prompts. The book will figure prominently in orientation activities and then serve as a touchstone for several special campus events throughout the academic year–all designed to create a shared intellectual journey that will engage the big questions about life, curiosity, identity, and purpose that bind together our campus community.
Westover’s book describes her childhood and her studies at Brigham Young University, Harvard, and Cambridge–all without ever having attended grade school. The rigor of a university education requires students and teachers alike to take constant stock of what they know, what they don’t know, and where to look to learn more. At the same time, it requires us to engage deeply yet respectively with people who have different histories, identities, and values than our own. “Educated” tracks one person’s experience of moving from the confines of a deeply fundamentalist family and into a larger, more complex world where she must weigh tradition against innovation and self-sufficiency against the need for community–all, as she writes, in the service of a creating “a changed person, a new self.”
“Educated” displays the value of recognizing one’s limits and then planning and implementing strategies to surpass them. The lessons Westover shares with readers resonate beyond the classroom, motivating readers not simply to acknowledge alternative perspectives, but to delight in discovering and discussing them with others. The community fostered amid these discussions represents the heart of a college education, instilling a life-long passion for learning and curiosity. Above all, the book serves as testament to the transformative power of education.
Westover’s work directly engages the theme of Movement, the topic that will shape an entire year of innovative programming at TU’s Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. In addition to the transformative power of education, her story captures education’s motive power–the way learning can dislodge misinformed beliefs and misjudgments. Moreover, Westover moves from rural Idaho to Utah; then to England, Massachusetts, and back to England. She now resides in New York. With each relocation, she moves beyond her limitations emotionally and intellectually, whether she’s distancing herself from her family’s uncompromising views of reality, or moving backwards in time, coming to better understand Mormon theology as an intellectual movement.
A best-seller and one of the most widely discussed memoirs of the last decade, “Educated” offers a reflective, accessible, and exciting opportunity to think about what it means to leave home, form a sense of self, grapple with our history, and imagine a thriving future. It thus offers a rich introduction not simply to The University of Tulsa but to the practice of life-long learning to which we dedicate ourselves.
Educated depicts the intensity of Westover’s upbringing in a tight-knit, religious, anti-establishment family. Many of her experiences showcase the value of self-reliance, but they also reveal the jeopardy of “off-the-grid” living. Like Westover’s home state of Idaho, Oklahoma’s state mythology revolves around radical individualism and a live-off-the-land mentality that’s often in tension with free inquiry and community obligations. Westover reveals the profound impacts that an off-the-grid upbringing can have on one’s beliefs, behaviors, and interests. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay “Self-Reliance” echoes throughout Westover’s work, prodding readers to think critically, both about labor and the divisions between civic communities, family, and the individual.
Tara Westover is an American historian and memoirist. Her first book, Educated, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and remained on the list, in hardcover, for more than two years. The book, a memoir of her upbringing in rural Idaho, was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the L.A. Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. To date it has been translated into more than 45 languages. The New York Times named Educated one of the 10 Best Books of 2018, and the American Booksellers Association voted Educated the Nonfiction Book of the Year. In 2019, Time Magazine named Westover one of the 100 Most Influential People. Westover holds a PhD in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 2019 she was the Rosenthal Writer in Residence at Harvard University. In 2023, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden.