Seven-year-old Tara grows up on Buck's Peak without school, hospitals, or birth certificates, aware her family is unlike other families.

Tyler announces his plan to attend college, defying Gene's belief that universities are tools of the Illuminati.

Luke's gasoline-soaked jeans catch fire in the junkyard, leaving him severely burned while eleven-year-old Tara tends to him alone.

Shawn returns home and shoves Tara's head in the toilet after she pours water on him, beginning a pattern of abuse.

Tyler visits Buck's Peak, witnesses Shawn attacking Tara, and privately urges her to take the ACT and escape to BYU.

Tara scores a 28 on her second ACT attempt and receives an acceptance letter from Brigham Young University.

At BYU, Tara discovers she has never heard of the Holocaust and spends hours reading about it alone in the library.

Shawn attacks Tara in front of her boyfriend Charles at a Thanksgiving dinner; Charles ends their relationship, saying only she can save herself.

A BYU psychology professor describes bipolar disorder and Tara realizes the description fits her father precisely.

Gene is critically burned in a work explosion and nearly dies multiple times while refusing to be taken to a hospital.

Professor Steinberg at Cambridge reads Tara's first essay and declares it one of the best he has ever received.

Tara graduates from BYU and boards a flight to England, leaving for graduate school at Cambridge.

Tara tells Gene that Shawn threatened to kill Audrey; Gene calls Shawn, who arrives and threatens Tara with a knife.

Tyler and his wife send a letter to the entire family defending Tara after Gene threatens to disown Tyler for taking her side.

Tara submits her PhD dissertation on her twenty-seventh birthday and passes her dissertation defense.

Tara Westover grows up on a remote Idaho mountain, kept from school, doctors, and the outside world by her survivalist father Gene. Her brother Tyler's departure for college plants the first seed of possibility, and after enduring years of abuse from her brother Shawn, Tara earns a place at Brigham Young University. College exposes the enormous gaps in her knowledge and the toxicity she normalized at home, and a fellowship at Cambridge opens doors to graduate school and transformative mentorship. When she finally confronts her family about Shawn's abuse, she is cut off and nearly loses everything, including her PhD. Supported at last by her brother Tyler, Tara completes her dissertation and arrives at a hard-won understanding of what her education truly cost and gave her.

Tara's journey from the mountain to her PhD.

Grandma-down-the-hill tries to take young Tara to Arizona to attend school; Tara watches their car drive away without her.

Faye trains as a midwife under Judy, earns her own income, and becomes noticeably more independent and assertive.

Gene drives the family home through a severe winter snowstorm; the van crashes in a field and injures several family members.

Tara takes dance lessons and performs in a recital while Gene watches disapprovingly from the audience.

Gene forces the family to seal food in the cellar all summer to prepare for Y2K while Tara escapes to Annie rehearsals.

Gene waits up for the Y2K apocalypse on New Year's Eve; when nothing happens, he appears diminished and childlike to Tara.

Shawn and Tara bond during a long-haul trucking trip with their brother Tony, inventing word games and practicing martial arts in parking lots.

Gene brings home a dangerous metal-cutting machine; after Luke gashes his arm, Shawn insists on working the machine alongside Tara.

Tara returns home for her first college summer and Gene throws her clothes on the front lawn when she takes a job in town.

Tara earns near-perfect grades in her first year at BYU and qualifies for a half-tuition scholarship.

Tara's BYU bishop pays her fourteen-hundred-dollar dental bill and repeatedly urges her to apply for a federal grant.

Shawn throws his wife Emily outside in freezing temperatures with no coat or shoes because she bought the wrong crackers; the family stays silent.

Dr. Kerry watches Tara walk fearlessly along the chapel rooftop at Cambridge and tells her she looks finally at home in herself.

Audrey emails Tara at Cambridge admitting that Shawn abused her too and begging for help confronting him together.

Tara attends Grandma-over-in-town's funeral, reconnects warmly with Aunt Angie's family, and finds a new way to experience home.

Alongside the main arc of Tara's education, a series of formative events quietly shaped who she was and who she could become. Her mother Faye's transformation into a midwife showed Tara that women could build independent lives, while Gene's Y2K obsession and the family's reckless car crashes revealed the cost of his unchecked authority. After leaving for BYU, Tara struggled financially, found unexpected allies in a church bishop, and slowly built a life at college that felt more like home than Buck's Peak. At Cambridge, mentors saw something in her that she could not yet see in herself, even as her family's dysfunction continued to unfold back in Idaho. By the memoir's close, Tara finds an unexpected route back to a version of home through extended family who welcome her warmly.

The moments that shaped Tara's world before and after leaving home.

Gene tells the family about the Weaver family's standoff with federal agents, teaching young Tara to fear the government and all outsiders.

The family struggles to obtain birth certificates because they have no school or medical records; Tara feels strange being legally documented for the first time.

Tara nearly plunges into a scrap metal bin while Gene operates the forklift and barely escapes injury; Gene sends her home alone to recover.

After the winter car crash injures Tara's neck, Shawn returns home and violently cracks it, unexpectedly relieving her pain; she imagines him as a protector.

Gene tells Tara that wanting to attend college means 'whoring after man's knowledge'; she briefly abandons her plans to apply.

Tara defies Gene's direct orders after Shawn's motorcycle accident and drives him to the hospital herself, knowing it will create a rift.

Tara reads her Western Civilization textbook for the first time after classmate Vanessa reveals she has never actually read it.

Tara takes over-the-counter pain medicine for an earache at Charles's insistence and is unsettled when it works immediately.

Tara writes about Shawn's abuse in her journal for the first time after he injures her wrist at Christmas, wanting her story told in her own words.

Tara's BYU bishop helps her examine her upbringing and she realizes she has absorbed the word 'whore' as a description of her own existence.

During a camping trip, Emily confides to Tara that she knows Shawn will hurt her but intends to marry him anyway.

Faye admits over the phone that she always knew about Shawn's abuse and apologizes to Tara; Tara feels briefly hopeful that things will change.

Gene visits Tara at Harvard and offers a priesthood blessing to cast out her supposed demons; she tells him she loves him but refuses.

Tara discovers emails on the family computer showing Faye called her a threat; she loads a box of memories into her car and drives away.

Tara reflects on her transformation from the girl on the mountain, concluding that what changed her is what she calls an education.

Beneath the events of Tara's life lies a series of quieter but equally powerful turning points, moments where her understanding of herself and her family shifted in ways she could not immediately name. From the early shock of having her birth legally documented to the slow recognition that her brother's cruelty was abuse and not her fault, Tara's internal education ran alongside her formal one. Leaving home cracked open her worldview, and each small act of rebellion, taking medicine, reading a textbook, writing in her journal, quietly built toward larger confrontations. The revelation that her mother had lied about protecting her and the moment she refused her father's blessing marked the final rupture between who she had been and who she was becoming. In the end, Tara names the whole transformation for what it is: an education.