Educated: A Memoir Summary and Analysis

Section Four Summary: New Horizons (Chapters 24–29)

After learning about bipolar disorder in Psychology 101, Tara revisits her childhood memories and becomes convinced that Gene suffers from the disorder. In Buck’s Peak Gene is severely burned by an exploding fuel tank and almost dies, having refused medical attention. He eventually recovers against all odds, which he claims was God’s will. He and Faye use the seemingly miraculous recovery as marketing for their essential oils business, which begins to do very well financially. Shawn gets engaged to and then marries a timid girl named Emily, whom Tara feels unable to protect.

Back at BYU, Tara finds herself drawn to studying history but worries that it’s not an appropriate subject for a woman to pursue as a career. A professor convinces her to stick with it and secures her a spot in a study-abroad program at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, Tara once again finds herself feeling out of place, but once she gets absorbed in a research project she does very well academically, and her supervisor encourages her to go to graduate school.

When the Cambridge program ends, Tara returns to Utah and successfully applies for the Gates scholarship, which will allow her to return to Cambridge as a graduate student. Tara’s parents meet up with her in Utah, and Tara feels embarrassed when Gene publicly espouses anti-Semitic conspiracy theories when they are out at a restaurant. After graduation from BYU, Tara’s parents drop her off at the airport and she returns to England.

Section Four Analysis: New Horizons (Chapters 24–29)

Tara’s speculation about Gene’s mental health is the first time we see her trying to understand her family dynamic from an intellectual angle. Notably, her reaction is one of anger: She sees for the first time how unhealthy it is that her family is expected to do whatever Gene says without complaint, even at the cost of personal safety, and how unfair it is to everyone involved. Despite her anger, Tara also shows empathy to both Faye and Shawn here. While the two of them have each abused Tara in their own ways, Tara is able to see them as fellow victims.

In previous sections, Tara has described reality as something fluid in the context of abuse (for example, her claim in Chapter 13 that Tyler seeing Shawn attack her “made it real”). In this section, her questioning of reality extends to more benign situations. At Cambridge, for example, she finds herself more uncomfortable than she had been at BYU because, as she writes on Chapter 28, “The contrast here was too great, the world before my eyes too fantastical. The memories were more real—more believable—than the stone spires.” And yet, after her program ends, she uses similar language to describe her parents when they visit her in Provo: “Here, so near the university, they seemed so unreal as to be almost mythic” (Ch. 29). Now that she has finished college, it is clear that Tara must choose one of these worlds to be the “real” one.