Westover was the youngest of seven children born in
Clifton, Idaho (population 259) to Mormon
survivalist parents, whom she
pseudonymously refers to as Gene and Faye. She has five older brothers and an older sister. She was not registered for a
birth certificate until she was nine years old. Their father resisted getting formal medical treatment for any of the family. Even when seriously injured, the children were treated only by their mother, who had studied
herbalism and other methods of
alternative healing. All of the siblings were loosely
homeschooled by their mother. Westover has said an older brother taught her to read, and she studied the scriptures of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But she never attended a lecture, wrote an essay, or took an exam. There were few textbooks in their house. As a teenager, Westover began to want to enter the larger world and attend college. She purchased textbooks and
studied independently in order to score well on the
ACT, following the suggestion of Tyler, one of her older brothers. She gained admission to
Brigham Young University in
Provo, Utah and was awarded a scholarship, although she had no high school diploma. After a difficult first year, in which Westover struggled to adjust to
academia and the wider society at university, she became more successful and graduated with honors in 2008. Next, she earned a
master's degree from the
University of Cambridge at
Trinity College in
Cambridge, England as a
Gates Cambridge scholar, and was a visiting fellow at
Harvard University in
Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2010. She returned to Trinity College earning a
doctorate degree in
intellectual history in 2014. Her thesis is entitled "The Family, Morality and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890". In 2009, while a
graduate student at Cambridge, Westover told her parents that for many years (since age 15), she had been physically and psychologically abused by an older brother, Shawn. Her parents denied her account and suggested that Westover was under the influence of
Satan. The family split over the events. Westover wrote about the estrangement, and her unusual path to and through university education in her acclaimed 2018 memoir,
Educated. ==Career==