Tara Westover is the narrator and protagonist of Educated. Given that the memoir traces her memories of her life from the time that she was 7 years old to the recent past, when she was 27 or 28 years old. Accounting for such a wide time frame in an individual’s life in a work of nonfiction leaves ample possibility for the characters to see significant changes to their values, beliefs, behaviors, and relationships. This is undoubtedly the case for Westover throughout her life; as she becomes more educated in the outside world, the more she changes.

As a child and teenager, Westover sees the world through the lens of her father’s perspective on the world. Her “education” occurs in the tiny world of the Idaho mountain she grows up on—the mountain that most of her family members have never left. Due to the insularity of her family’s life and the paranoia of her father, Westover’s interactions with the world are characterized by black and white thinking and dogmatism. This dogmatism is also shaped by her family’s fundamentalist religious beliefs. Westover grows up Mormon, but her parents’ version of this belief system is taken to an extreme: They believe that only their family, and others who hold the exact same beliefs, will be saved from eternal damnation and suffering at the end of the world.