Educated: A Memoir

Westover documents her first major venture away from home. Faye drove Westover to BYU on New Year’s Day, and Westover quickly found that she felt out of place in the city and with her immodest roommates, who wore tight clothes and went shopping on the Sabbath. She thought of Gene and knew he would say that they were not real Mormons. Each time they violated a commandment, Westover fled to her room.

Westover felt equally out of place in her classes. She did not know what “the essay form” (163) was in her freshman English course, and she had never heard of Cicero and Hume in her American history classes. She could not make any sense of her textbooks, and she failed her first quiz in American history, missing every single question.

Westover suspected that the “education” she was given at home was not good enough, but the alienation she felt in her new environment caused her to cling even more strongly to the beliefs of her upbringing. This devotion did not waver until one day, in her Western art course, she noticed a word she did not recognize in a caption beneath an image. She raised her hand to ask the professor about it: “I don’t know this word.