Educated by Tara Westover is a memoir set in an isolated community with views of striking mountains. Geographically Idaho in the USA has large tracts of rugged, beautiful wilderness. The state also has a significant Mormon population. Educated is about growing up in a large family of seven children with fundamentalist Mormon survivalist parents. But it is not a story primarily about religion.

An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

Tara did not set foot in a classroom till she was seventeen, receiving what little education she did from her mother and through self-learning. The family did not visit doctors or hospitals. Even life threatening injuries were treated by Tara’s mother, a kind of healer who used herbs and tinctures and the will of god to mend people. The children did not have birth certificates, education or medical records until they were teenagers.

But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way.

The children worked in their father’s scrap yard without protective equipment. He was a man who believed in grand conspiracies, hoarded food and guns, and avoided contact with bureaucracy.

I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.

Tara’s desire for an education motivated her to break away from family ties, eventually earning a Doctorate at Cambridge University. When a lecturer described the profile of bipolar in a psychology class, Tara recognised her father in it. The cost of leaving the small community was estrangement from her family, but the decision probably saved her. It also enabled her to learn to trust her own views of the world.

My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.

As the narrative unfolds, it becomes evident that the key themes of Educated are mental illness, loyalty, family violence and how those issues can pervert people’s views of the world – in this case in a framework of religion and conspiracy theories about the end of the world. Tara’s story is also about identity, the reliability of memory and how education can lift one up and offer freedom from a life that seemed predestined .

The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education

Educated if beautifully written but difficult to read. I was mesmerised and left with the sense that sometimes life really is stranger than fiction. It is a wonder that Tara survived to tell the tale.